Free tuition has been a hotly debated topic for some time now in many countries, including Canada. It is in the best interest of millions of people to provide free tuition as it means more equal access to education for all. It also promotes education and fixes a broken system of teaching which focuses more on research than producing well rounded alumni.
Free tuition promotes education by making it so that everyone can have more equal access to opportunities that were previously accessible only to the very privileged. Charging tuition fees perpetuates the divide between the rich and the poor by creating the barrier of student debt. Families with lower household incomes automatically spend more of their household incomes on tuition then rich families because the cost of tuition is the same for both, but household income is not. By removing this barrier for low income families, it would mean that the next generations of children from this background would have a better chance at lifting themselves up over the poverty line. Making it so that all students had to worry about were living expenses would take a lot of the stress and deterrence out of getting a post-secondary education. Generally speaking, people who get a higher education can also contribute more to the economy.
One argument against free tuition is that we would be supporting a broken system instead of fixing it. This is based off of the premise that universities where created for the purpose of research instead of teaching which means that many universities allocate a lot more of their money and resources towards research then towards teaching. While this is true, the system tends to fix itself when we introduce free tuition.
German universities for example, used to be some of the top universities in the world. However, they have dropped in their ranking significantly since they have been offering free tuition. This is because there has been a shift in focus from research to teaching, and the ranking system is based on research and does not take into account other factors such as teaching. So, by providing free tuition, the system starts to repair itself. Universities begin to shift their priorities from producing quality research to producing quality alumni.
It would benefit a huge portion of the population to offer free tuition for everyone because it would make education more widely available and would fix aspects of the post-secondary education system. In addition, people who have some form of post-secondary education generally get higher paying jobs, so they contribute more to the economy in the long run. Canada should consider this making short-term investment in order to accrue the long-term gain of educating its citizens.
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