Only struggle educates the exploited class. Only struggle discloses to it the magnitude of its own power, widens its horizon, enhances its abilities, clarifies its mind, forges its will.
— Lenin
The conservative Ontario government has approved plans for a private for-profit university operated by Global University Systems offering master’s and bachelor’s degrees. This is the same government that scrapped three planned public university campuses in Brampton, Milton, and Markham, and sabotaged the introduction of the public Université de l’Ontario français. This government has stopped all plans for the expansion of the public post-secondary education (PSE) system and are now threatening the public system with the introduction of a private for-profit university based in Ontario.
The announcement of a private for-profit university in Niagara Falls, Ontario, is a massive attack on public delivery of social services, democratic rights, and the universal right to education. In 1976, the federal government signed the United Nations International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. By signing the Covenant, the state endorsed Article 13, recognizing “the right of everyone to an education.” Clause 2(c), states that “higher education shall be made equally accessible to all, on the basis of capacity, by every appropriate means, and in particular by the progressive introduction of free education.”
Instead of the “progressive introduction of free education,” there has been massive disinvestment, which has made education inaccessible for too many. Corporate partnerships with public institutions have demonstrably stifled academic freedom and democracy. It is nearly impossible for working-class students to leave school without massive debt, with an average debt of $28,000 for a bachelor’s degree. The total amount of student loans owed to the federal government hit $22.3 billion in 2020. International students are faced with three to five times the tuition cost of domestic students and are being used to make up for cuts to funding, with international students paying approximately 40 percent of the tuition fees at Canadian universities. Record profits of over $7 billion by Canadian universities in 2021 came on the back of workers’s livelihoods: salaries and wages for non-instructional staff decreased by 1.6 percent, compared with a 0.2 percent decline for academic staff salaries, as mass layoffs or non-renewal of contracts in non-academic staff let profits soar. We are witnessing the beginning of the restructuring of higher education to better serve the ruling class. We need to bring policies of unity with labour and class struggle to the student movement in order to turn the tide.
The capitalist class, on the offensive globally, has decided that it is no longer willing to pay for public education in Canada. Public funding to PSE in Canada has been slashed from 80 percent 30 years ago to under 50 percent today. Public funding for PSE has been stagnant or decreasing for more than a decade, despite soaring inflation. From 2008 to 2020, student enrolment increased by more than 20 percent, and income from tuition rose by nearly 70 percent across Canada. Big business, which dictates most of government policy, has made it clear that it is not concerned with expanding access to quality education in Canada. The capitalists are lobbying hard to limit access and take direct control over universities and colleges.
The restructuring of Laurentian University from its tricultural commitment to serve the community into a vocational institution for the mining monopolies; the radical changes to the college sector, which now relies on precarious part-time and contractual instructors; the unregulated and exploitative private for-profit sector, which is predominantly oriented toward international students or impoverished people; the corporatization of PSE administration and the embarrassingly ballooning compensation for administrators; the introduction of performance-based funding in some provinces — these are all symptoms of a dying public PSE system in Canada. We cannot fall for the cynical traps offered by the bourgeoisie — the argument that liberal arts education is a luxury, that only “employable” studies should be offered, or that free education will subsidize the wealthy by taxing workers. Our role as young communists is to build unity in action, inject ideas of class struggle, and try to navigate away from adventurous or reformist dead ends. Only socialism will provide a real barrier-free democratic and emancipatory education for all that work for it. However, in the meantime, we need to fight tooth and nail to stop the dismantlement of the post-war gains, which would take higher education out of the hands of the public. Education is a right, but the only way for young people and students to have that right is to stand up and fight for it.