The rise of financial masochism

By Ryan McLaughlin

I generally agree that, as Trudeau famously proclaimed, “There’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.” Most know this simple rule as ‘different strokes for different folks’. After all, what right do we have to tell people with unusual desires what is fine for them to do in the privacy of their own homes?  With that being said, even I am sometimes aghast at what some sickos get up to.

Increasingly, an unusual fetish has become popular among students at SFU and elsewhere called financial masochism. This is where students get some sort of inexplicable sexual kick out of arguing that tuition fees are at the right level. Much like Goldilocks, these twisted individuals derive pleasure out of a middle ground where tuition fees are not too high and not too low, but just right. Some even go so far as to say that tuition fees aren’t high enough. I am aware that it is the style of the day to argue against your own economic interest, but I think it’s clear that this has gone too far. Someone needs to tell these folks just how dangerous their lifestyle choices really are — they might actually convince someone of something.

Imagine a great big Venn diagram — you know, the one that looks like boobs. On the left boob you have “Things that are good for society.” In this category you have stuff like building a giant Slip ‘n Slide through downtown Vancouver, mandating a 20-hour work week, or adding the right of a weekly visit to Happy Time Exotic Massage down on Hastings in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. On the right boob you have “Things that are good for the economy”. In there is stuff like outlawing recycling (punishable by death), mandating an 80-hour work week, and turning the elderly into Soylent Green to feed the 12-year-old Guatemalan labourers in our Nike factories. Then, right in the middle where the boobs overlap, there is a special place where all kinds of wonderful things exist. This is that location where things are miraculously both good for society and good for economy. In that cleavage lays the prize: reduced tuition fees. Society benefits from lower tuition because people who deserve to get an education can. The economy benefits from the existence of skilled doctors and lawyers and astro-physicists and people who got an arts degree.

Unfortunately, over the last few decades, we’ve been doing not that. While public funding accounted for 84 per cent of university operating budgets in 1977, it now accounts for just 57 per cent. Over the same period, tuition fees have risen from 14 per cent of operating funding for colleges and universities to over 34 per cent. It’s hard to believe, but there was once a time when student fees were simply an afterthought to Canadian students.

As fees for university have increased, the necessity of university has as well. Sympathizers for high tuition fees often claim that it is only the government’s job to ensure a basic education from kindergarten through grade 12, but this promise used to mean a lot more than it does now. Being educated to grade 12 was once all that a person needed to exist in society, but this is simply not the case anymore. The promise of a ‘basic’ education, quite frankly, is no longer fulfilled only with a high school diploma; it probably includes a largely unfunded bachelor’s degree as well.

No one is saying everyone should get to go to university, after all, someone has to cook my McNuggets. However, the test for who should get to go to university shouldn’t be how wealthy your parents are, it should be, well, a test. If you get good enough grades, you should get to go to university no matter what. If you do poorly on your exams, it shouldn’t matter how much money you have, you should not be allowed in the doors of any Canadian institution lest you infect the intellectual purity of the place with your stupid.

What young financial masochists fail to realize is that if students don’t fight for their share of the pie in society, someone else will take it. Students could learn a lot from the old, for example. The government recently flirted with the idea of raising the retirement age and every old person’s head simultaneously exploded. Maybe if students made a bit more of a fuss about stuff, we could get some wealth redistributed in our direction for once.