Plum Blossoms

The NDP sent post-secondary education in this province into quite a mess a long time ago when the capped tuition fees. Now nobody said how long this tuition cap was supposed to last: evidently a few thousand bucks in tuition would probably be an acceptable level for a bachelor's degree when the price of a stalk of celery was also a few thousand bucks. And evidently the fact that higher education is prized more than ever in the workplace should have no bearing on tuition levels, and therefore it is unimaginable that there would be this massive competition to get into universities that sent entry grade cut-offs into the nineties.

Now, four years after the universities have the chance to actually recuperate some cash and bring tuition levels somewhere near national averages, the NDP is asking to cap tuition levels again, at their current levels.

First of all, if the NDP really thinks that tuition levels are too high, why are they capping them at the current levels? Are they telling us that we must pay excessively high tuition forever? No, they tell us, it's to keep us from paying even higher tuition than right now. Well then, are we saying that the past four years, which evidently have been so bad for students, aren't really all that bad at all? That those horrible costs to our youth were really not so horrible? You can't have it both ways. At least the Liberals can claim that current tuition levels are “right” after four years of them being “wrong” (not that I believe that), but the NDP is saying that things went wrong and they'll never be right ever again.

Then you look in the NDP platform and there's this retarded chart that says that tuition has doubled since Gordon Campbell was elected. Well that's great, but the price of a can of pop can double, nay, quadruple, depending on whether I buy it from Costco or a vending machine at the SUB. Things tend to “double” pretty easily when the base price is ridiculously cheap. Guess what else was ridiculously cheap before the Liberals were elected. That's right, post-secondary tuition!

What's so sad is that NDP-esque stupidity on the issue of post-secondary tuition is just the type of crap that gets lapped up by these supposedly future talents in our universities. They bemoan skyrocketing student debt, but evidently never think that it's so horrendous that they drop out of school and get a job. Doesn't that suggest that they think that all that debt might be, heaven forbid, worth it? The whole idea of going to university after coming out of high school is that you'll get whatever benefits from it later on in life. If the benefits are immediate, then what's the rush in going to university so early in life? And if you're paying now for future benefits, doesn't the concept of debt seem kind of intuitive?

My accounting prof often asks a rhetorical question: “would you like to pay a million dollars in income taxes?” It's the same deal here: big benefits don't come with big costs. If you don't want to pay for anything, sure, but you're sure not going to get anything from it.