McGill MBA students 'left out to dry' by tuition fight

Share

Quebec is grappling with the combustible question of how to price a university degree fairly, wondering whether its tuition levels - Canada's lowest - have fallen out of step with the costs of quality education.

But nowhere has the province's existing philosophy been more boldly defied than at McGill University's Desautels Faculty of Management, which has rejected provincial subsidies to its MBA program in favour of charging whatever private fees it chooses.

Last spring, McGill announced plans to self-fund its MBA program by raising tuition to $29,500 a year from $1,700. Michelle Courchesne, Quebec's education minister at the time, retaliated swiftly, threatening to claw back $28,000 a student in other subsidies to keep McGill on par with the province's other schools.

The showdown cooled somewhat in August when Line Beauchamp assumed the Education portfolio, declining to take a hard-line stand immediately. McGill went ahead with its fee hike, prepared to weather any backlash, and the focus soon turned to protests against a government promise to raise all Quebec tuition rates in 2012.

A spokesman for Ms. Beauchamp said the minister is still evaluating the government's next steps regarding McGill, but some new MBA students say they have already been penalized for their school's action.

Quebec's financial aid program promised first-year student Pat Tenneriello, who applied to McGill before the changes, nearly $9,000 a year, with less than a third to be repaid. Then in October, a month after school started, a letter arrived revising his support because he enrolled in a privately funded program. He now receives $7,600 in loans, and expects to be $80,000 in debt when he finishes.

"Where I think [we are]feeling upset and left out to dry is from how the government has reacted," Mr. Tenneriello said. "Rather than saying, 'Okay, wow, your tuition has increased tenfold, let's make this easier for you,' while trying to penalize McGill they've actually penalized the students."

Come what may, McGill has no plans to turn back, and will hike MBA fees a further $3,000 for the next cohort.

"We're proceeding with the program, we're recruiting the second year of students now, and this is the way we're going to do business," said Peter Todd, dean of the Desautels school.

Last spring, Ms. Courchesne promised equity in university funding. Why, she asked, "should Quebeckers accept that we give [McGill]the same amount of money [as other universities]while they are asking $30,000 from individuals?"

In an open letter, several Quebec business leaders fired back that insisting all universities be treated equally is a recipe for mediocrity, thus framing the debate over the province's underlying philosophy.

The Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante (ASSÉ), which represents 40,000 Quebec students, called McGill's decision "a terrible attack to the accessibility of education," and worries the government should have acted faster to prevent it.

"We think [it's]very ominous. It announces a very deep evolution in the way we see postsecondary education in Quebec," said ASSÉ spokesman Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois. "We think it's the kind of decision we're going to have to face more and more because of the [growing]privatization of our universities."

Queen's University was the first Canadian institution to privatize its MBA tuition in the mid-1990s, and others outside Quebec have followed suit, defending annual fees in excess of $30,000 by citing graduates' high earning potential. McGill argues it is simply staying competitive, and the old model was unsustainable because students each cost the school $22,000 a year, offset by only $12,000 a student in tuition and government grants.

"If each student is costing $10,000 more than we're receiving, someone else in the system is paying for that," Mr. Todd said.

Mr. Tenneriello, who is also president of McGill's MBA student association, said most of his classmates support the increase. But he found it "a tough, tough decision" to commit to a $59,000 degree and wonders whether the price tag will deter some "quality students."

The Desautels school received just as many applications to the program after the increase, Mr. Todd said, but is addressing accessibility concerns by awarding 10 times as much money in student aid and bursaries than before.

Ultimately, Mr. Todd is gambling that Quebec's days of trying to fit all schools into one funding model are numbered.

"The simple fact of the matter is there are elite institutions, major research institutions in Quebec that have different missions. And I think at some point you have to recognize that you're going to fund universities with different missions in different ways," he said. "That's common in other places, and Quebec should probably think about that a little bit."