Students need a real role in MOU negotiations
Governments, universities, and students all influence the way education works. But here is a troubling dilemma: at the moment, universities, governments, and students have different interests.
Nova Scotia’s current government unsurprisingly wants to limit spending, and that means less funding for universities and less assistance to students; university administrators want more revenue (in other words, more government funding, and higher tuition fees); students want high quality, affordable education, and that can only happen with lower tuition fees and a greater level of funding and assistance.
All of these interests can, at times, work against each other. For that reason, and to build an effective educational policy, it is important that everyone gets a seat at the table, and an opportunity to participate in the conversation. That is not the case right now – in fact, it has never been the case.
Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs) are agreements between the provincial government and universities about post-secondary education policies. Students have only had observer status in conversations that led to past MOUs, and they had to exert a great deal of pressure to get to that position. That, of course, wasn’t easy. But despite the huge amount of effort, the outcome wasn’t enough, and the result of our weak and unfair standing in past years is a lack of representation.
From there we not only ended up having the third highest level of tuition fees in Canada, we also got unbearable fee hikes in the past few years, an incredibly high level of student debt (one of the highest in the country), along with an expected 10 per cent increase in tuition costs throughout the next four years. And let’s not even begin talking about what international students have to go through – that would take an article of its own.
Instead of changing the conditions that lead to such negligence of student interests, the most recent MOU will not even allow students their past position as spectators. In fact, faculty members have also been dismissed from the conversation. Memorandums of Understanding are becoming increasingly secretive, and that’s frustrating, because it forces students to confront a bitter realization: the government is not working to ensure the interests of student, and neither are universities.
The only people who can change this appalling reality are the students themselves, and we have been successful before. Students in Newfoundland and Quebec have been effectively blocking unfair attempts to raise tuition fees since the 1990s. That’s why they, on average, pay about four times less on education fees than we do at Dal. Newfoundland’s students in particular were able to get their point across so well that all loans have been replaced with grants this year.
To bring my point back home, Nova Scotia’s students have both the numbers and the capability to have something similar happen here. Affordable education and better representation is what we all want, and the first step to get there is to stop the unnecessary fee hikes and to get recognized as a voting party on MOUs. We deserve nothing less than full participation in the conversations that decide our future.
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