Let’s pay kids to go to school

University students will be back in their classes in the coming month and most will be worrying not just about grades, but about how to to pay off their student loans after they graduate.

In our family, we’ve tried to use education savings plans for our late arrivals. Our first generation, however, didn’t have that advantage. Our eldest daughter and her husband largely paid their own way. By the time our youngest daughter was ready, we were either rich enough, or wise enough, to finance her schooling.

What brings this to mind is a new book out in the U.S., Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide in American Education (University of California Press).

Canadians like to think that higher education is much more accessible, and more affordable, than in the United States.

But in reading of recent developments affecting the financing of Canada’s top schools, it’s evident that we’re seeing the same core problem of endowment losses from hard-hit contributors, and what author Peter Sacks calls “massive disinvestment” by government.

As a symptom of how hard Canadian universities are fighting for government funding, a consortium of five top schools is demanding they keep the lion’s share of research money. They argue that the leading universities — B.C., Alberta, Montreal, Toronto and McGill — deserve support because of their success in conducting research and turning out postgrad students.

Sounds like a reasonable argument, but it doesn’t go down well with the dozens of smaller Canadian universities. Jack Lightstone, president of Brock University in St. Catharines, Ont., puts it this way:

Starving people engage in desperate measures. That’s true of starving institutions, too.”

It’s the starvation of higher education that’s at the core of Sacks’ arguments in Tearing Down the Gates. The book the New York Times calls “indignant and informed” reveals a disastrous decline in public funding of American universities.

Sacks cites a typical example: state funding for the University of V irginia has dropped from 30 per cent a quarter-century ago to a mere eight percent today.

In Canada, the Big Five account for just five per cent of student enrollment, but have received one-third of all federal research grants. They’d like to keep it that way.

Politicians like to pay tribute to our universities as the source of future innovation and the only assurance of an educated work force that will  keep Canada competitive in the global information society. Their actions don’t always support their words.

I’ve long held the belief that education is so important that we should not only provide free university to qualified young Canadians, but that we should PAY them to attend.

That’s probably an unrealistic position in an era of government deficits, recession cutbacks and financial meltdowns.

But it’s the only way of ensuring that Canada will hone the skills it needs to compete in the 21st century. And let our young people compensate society by giving a year or two of themselves to public service. Like caring for the aged, doing environmental duty, or assisting the homeless.

With apologies to W.P. Kinsella (Field of Dreams), I say Give to them, and they will give back to us.