In the days following the recent Drop Fees rally, students weighed the pros and cons of dropping tuition fees at a debate hosted by the Carleton University Debate Society (CUDS) Nov. 12.
The debate, entitled “Should we RAISE or drop fees?” attracted a handful of students gathered in the Unicentre to hear the arguments presented by CUDS members in a Canadian Parliamentary show debate.
“The problem with the Drop Fees campaign is that people don’t know the other side,” said Sheliza Esmail, vice-president (external) of the club and the organizer of the event said.
Esmail said CUDS “has a mandate to promote the discussion of ideas and to facilitate discourse.”
The main focus of the debate was addressing the issue of accessibility — making education more affordable to a greater number of people — and opened with a statement from Nick Bergamini, vice-president (student issues) of Carleton University Students’ Association. Bergamini emphasized support for the actual idea of lowering tuition fees over the Drop Fees campaign. Bergamini stressed that the solution to the high tuition fees is scholarships for “people that work for it and people that need it.”
Arguments in favour of lowering tuition fees were largely regarding accessibility. A lack of access to post-secondary education, debaters argued, makes society less able to make informed decisions. The idea of block funding to education was proposed in order to lower tuition fees to a level that can be paid for by earnings from a minimum-wage summer job.
Those against lowering tuition fees disagreed, and emphasized concentrated funding over block funding. Lowering fees doesn’t help those who can’t afford to go already. They asserted that accessibility should be granted to those who have none, instead of making education more accessible to those who already have it.
Ross Finnie, a professor for the University of Ottawa’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, was present at the debate. He echoed the arguments presented for not dropping fees.
“By lowering fees, it doesn’t change who goes [to university],” Finnie said, who has been working on issues regarding access to post-secondary education for 15 years.
He said the issue of students not attending university has less to do with high tuition fees and more to do with the culture that some students are raised in that makes them either more or less likely to seek post-secondary education.
Finnie said there should be classes in high school that “tune people into thinking about going to university [and] going to college.”