Who Goes? Who Pays?
A Primer on Tuition and Student Aid Policy Research

Presentation to the
Canadian Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators Conference
by Robert F. Clift June 22, 1999

Abstract

Debates about tuition and student aid policy in Canada have tended to polarize with the free tuition advocates on one end and the market tuition advocates on the other. The evidence presented by each side tends to be based on incomplete pictures of sociological and economic factors. Robert Clift, a graduate student at UBC and long time activist in higher education, will review the research into tuition and student aid policy in Canada and suggest that accessibility would be enhanced if certain political questions are answered, with the aid of solid research, thus allowing the design of coherent policies and programs to address inequities.

Introduction

• For the most part, decisions about tuition levels and student financial aid packages have been political decisions made without the benefit of research as to the effect on student decisions about post-high-school destinations
• To the extent that current tuition and student financial aid polices seem to be "common sense", this is because they preserve a status quo which is not often questioned
• My purpose today is to question that status quo through an analysis of the arguments, a review of the research, and the posing of questions that I think should be answered in order to create a comprehensive, sustainable and defensible financial access policy.
• I intend this session to be interactive and will be inviting your participation at various points. Please feel free to jump in with your questions and comments, I think it will make it more interesting and useful to you.

The Big Questions

• Why should government support post-secondary institutions and students?
• One Answer: Because the public interest is served by preparing individuals, through post-secondary education and training, to fulfill economic functions and roles in civil society
• Who should be the beneficiaries of publicly-funded post-secondary education and training? Put another way, how can government spend money to maximize public interest?
• Some possible answers:
  • Preparing specialists in desired fields
  • Using post-secondary education and training to improve life chances of individuals (e.g. children of welfare recipients)
  • Ensuring a high level of education in order that individuals can serve civil roles
• Are there individuals or area of studies that governments should not subsidize?
• Some possible answers:
  • Business Administration
  • Law
  • People with financial means
• Are the answers to these questions definitive? Is there any disagreement?
• What type of tuition and financial aid policies might you design as the result of these questions?
• Some possible answers:
  • Full subsidization - Do children from lower class families attend at rates sufficiently high to justify full subsidization
  • Full market - Are there areas of study that might be desirable to society but which might cease to be offered if they had to rely upon generating income from student fees alone?
  • Mixed model - Who benefits? Who pays?
• My sly purpose in asking these questions, if you've not already discerned it, is to shake up some of your preconceptions about public subsidization of post-secondary education and training and to give you a sense of some of the questions I've asked myself as a researcher and activist in this area of inquiry.
• Let me tell you now about some of the research into this area.

Research Overview

Economic-based

• The most common type of research in this field tends to be based in economic theory, that is in a cost-benefit analysis. The input factors are costs of tuition, costs of supplies, costs of living, and opportunity costs; the output factor is average salary by discipline.
• This type of research has been carried out pretty much anywhere where there is post-secondary education and training.
• In Canada, University of Toronto economist David Stager has been producing such studies on and off for over 30 years. His most recent publication in this area was in 1996 in which he found that in looking at 1990 graduates of Ontario universities that with the exception of graduates from humanities, fine arts, and biological sciences programs, that the graduates had high rates of private return from their investment in post-secondary education.
• A second type of economic research is calculating the return to government in the form of increased tax revenues. Again, this type of research has been widely conducted. In Canada, the most recent purveyor of such studies is University of British Columbia economist Robert Allen. Like Stager, he finds lower rates of return in humanities, fine arts and agricultural and biological sciences, but overall finds government more than recoups its costs through increased tax revenues and thus argues for greater spending.

Student Choice

• A second area of research, originating primarily from the U.S., is the role of tuition and financial aid in determining the choice of institution by students. In summary, tuition levels and financial aid packages are significant determinant of what institution a student may attend and that non-traditional students are more sensitive to these factors.
• This type of research has not been very well developed, however, with respect to the initial choice to attend a post-secondary institution. In Canada there are a number of government surveys indicating that high tuition fees are a deterrent to choosing post-secondary education and training, however these responses amount to little more than an opinion poll as there is no attempt to uncover reasons why these opinions are held.
• A recent study that sheds further light on this is by Dianne Looker, a sociologist from Acadia University who has been conducting a longitudinal study of youth from Hamilton, Halifax and rural Nova Scotia.
• In her study of youth born in 1971, Looker found that of those students who had attained only high-school education by 1994, that the cost of tuition was the largest negative influence, and it was large negative influence for students who had entered non-university or university programs.
• Looker's study also found that student assistance programs were a strong positive influence at all levels, but not as positive and tuition was negative.
• Looker's study also brings into play the effect of the socio-economic status or class of the parents of these youth, using family income and education level of parents. Using a multivariate regression analysis, Looker finds that the concerns about tuition and financial aid are no longer statistically significant, whereas parental expectations, parental income and mother's education are far more important. Results similar to those in U.S. studies.

Cultural Capital

• Although I have discussed Looker's research as a type of student choice research, it actually is better classified as a type of research I call cultural capital research. That is, rather than act as merely an opinion poll, it seeks to uncover the various factors at play in decisions to attend post-secondary education and training.
• The term "cultural capital" comes from the work of French sociologist Pierre Bordieu who attempts to move beyond traditional ideas of social class to explain how individuals from the same class can have different destinations as adults.
• He postulates that individuals with cultural capital have dispositions, habits, behaviours, attitudes and the like which are necessary to succeed in the dominant culture, despite the lack of economic capital. For example, positive dispositions towards schooling, reading in the family, etc.
• In Canada, Diane Looker is joined by Lesley Andres of the University of British Columbia, Harvey Krahn of the University of Alberta, Paul Anisef of York University and Victor Thiessen of Dalhousie in conducting cultural capital research through longitudinal studies of young people with particular attention to their education and work destinations after they leave compulsory schooling.
• My own research comparing the socio-economic makeup of B.C. university students in 1965 compared to 1991 found that students whose fathers have a post-secondary credential made up a larger portion of the university population in 1991 than they did in 1965. Students whose parents lacked a university credential have gone on to post-secondary education and training at greater rates than in the past, but appear to have been diverted to non-university options.
• This result is confirmed to some extent by a 1998 Statistics Canada study of 1994 data which found that high education credentials and high-status occupations both positively affected the education outcome of children.

Discussion

• As you may have noticed, I've slyly redirected your attention from purely economic aspects of tuition and financial aid issues to issues about the social origins of students and the effect of social origins on educational attainment.
• Which raises the question, which is the correct approach to these issues?
• I think that the answer is that all of the approaches are correct.
• If you think back to the questions I posed at the beginning, it is apparent that post-secondary education and training serves many different purposes, for many different types of people.
• Yet, we have in Canada, for the most part, uniform tuition and financial aid policies whose foundations were established in 1964 with the founding of the Canada Student Loan Program
• What this says to me, and I know I'll be alienating some of the student groups here, is that rather than attempting to design and all encompassing policy in these matters, why not create differing policies for different segments?
• I know that the first response is that in Canada we strive for universality in social programs, a policy that has served us very well in health care.
• I think there is a difference in post-secondary education and training. Nobody, or at least very few people, would choose to remain ill if there were health care available to them without (direct) charge.
• However, as the cultural capital research demonstrates, people "choose", and I use the term loosely here, to not complete high school, and "choose" not to attempt post-secondary education or training, even when the means are provided.
• Those promoting the universality approach would argue that it is because the current means are not sufficient to the task and that these patterns will change given enough time.
• I think this amounts to willful ignorance of the cultural capital research and the fact that financial matters, although important, are minuscule in comparison to the sociological and psychological barriers
• Back to some practical considerations; if there were differentiated programs, how would they be designed and administered?
• This is where, I think, we need more research to determine what "deficiencies" we are trying to ameliorate.

Research Questions

• The questions that have occurred to me are:
• What is the current level of knowledge of Canadian high school students and their parents about:
  • the types of post-secondary education and training
  • the costs of the different types of post-secondary education and training
  • the availability of student financial aid
  • the process for obtaining student financial aid
  • level of earnings on graduation from a post-secondary program
• What are the attitudes of Canadian high school students and their parents about:
  • the value of post-secondary education
  • level of tuition fees
  • the effect of tuition fees on access to post-secondary education
  • how much debt they are willing to incur to obtain an education
• What are the differences in the answers to these questions (if any) based on:
  • socio-economic status
  • gender
  • disability
  • ethnicity
  • combinations of these characteristics
• What intervention strategies are most effective in assisting students without cultural and economic capital in successfully accessing and completing post-secondary education?
• This is a non-exhaustive list, and I'm sure you could come up with many more such questions.

Conclusion

• In conclusion, despite many years as and advocate in and student of this field, I have more questions than answers.
• I think the one idea we need to come to grips with is that although the research is informative, that tuition and financial aid policies are based on political questions like those I posed at the start of my presentation.
• We need to keep this in mind and try to steer a course between being completely political and completely technocratic.
• Finally, we shouldn't let complacency convince us that there is no possibility of change.

Table 1 Level of Education of Father of University Undergraduate Students - British Columbia - 1965

Notes.

^a Males in husband-wife families (which may or may not include children). Adapted from the Dominion Bureau of Statistics (1963) Table 97 (methodology from Rabinovitch, 1966, p. 47).

^b Non-university post-secondary student data is unavailable, but likely would have only a minor effect as total non-university enrolment was comparatively small. In 1966/67, full-time non-university enrolment in British Columbia was only 7.6% of total post-secondary enrolment (adapted from Dominion Bureau of Statistics, n.d., pp. 24 - 25). University student data is from An Analysis of the Canadian Post Secondary Student Population: Part I: A Report on Canadian Undergraduate Students (Rabinovitch, 1966) p. 47.

^c Ratio of representation is calculated by dividing the percentage of students by the percentage of the population for any given category of father's education. It is a relative measure of the unequal distribution of education. "A ratio of one would be equal representation; greater than one, over-representation; and less than one, under-representation" (Porter, 1965, pp. 186 - 187).

Table 2 Level of Education of Father of First-Year Post-Secondary Education Students British Columbia - 1991

Notes.

In order to make a comparison with Table 1, high school graduation must be combined with non-university post-secondary. This results in a combined ratio of representation of 0.97.

^a Male population aged 45-64 years from 1986 Census. Adapted from Client Survey Project: Survey Report (Ministry of Advanced Education, Training and Technology, 1992) p. 23.

^b Adapted from Client Survey Project: Survey Report (Ministry of Advanced Education, Training and Technology, 1992) p. 23.

^c Ratio of representation is calculated by dividing the percentage of students by the percentage of the population for any given category of father's education. It is a relative measure of the unequal distribution of education. "A ratio of one would be equal representation; greater than one, over-representation; and less than one, under-representation" (Porter, 1965, pp. 186 - 187).

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Related Web Links

Lesley Andres' Homepage
Lesley Andres is a faculty member in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia. Her primary research interest is a longitudinal study of the post-high-school destinations of young people.

Harvey Krahn's Homepage
Harvey Krahn is a sociologist at the University of Alberta. His research interests include youth transitions from school to work.

Dianne Looker's Homepage
Dianne Looker is a socilogist at Acadia University. Her primary research is on educational and occupational attainment of youth.