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From: chapman@fornax.UUCP
Newsgroups: can.politics
Subject: who should pay for education. sort of.
Message-ID: <215@fornax.uucp>
Date: Sun, 1-Mar-87 17:49:13 EST
Article-I.D.: fornax.215
Posted: Sun Mar  1 17:49:13 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 2-Mar-87 07:07:54 EST
Distribution: can
Organization: School of Computing Science, SFU, Burnaby, B.C. Canada
Lines: 62

I was talking to the dean of a medical school once and he told me
that it costs approximately 6 times as much per semester to put
a medical student through school as it does for typical university
students.  Part of this is because of the low student/teacher
ratio and part because of the expensive equipment and materials.

Around here student fees are about $1300 for a two semester year.
According to the university this covers only %25 of the actual
cost per student - leading to a figure of about $5200 per year.

So a medical student would cost about $30,000 per year to educate.
A doctor typically takes 8 years for a total cost of $240,000.
The student themselves pay only a very small portion of these fees.

What is the point? Well partly it's that I was quite pissed off
during the doctors strike in Ontario a year or so ago.  Here were
all these doctors whining because they only make $80,000 a year
on average and they have to see so many patients if they want to
make $100,000 a year; and threatening to go to the US if they
didn't get their way.  There was also some intimidation of patients
to publicly (by signing petitions) take the doctors side.
So here are all these people given an expensive education virtually
gratis, making what any reasonable person would consider good
money and yet their response is to threaten to leave.

My reaction at the time was to let em go but on reflection I think
they should have been asked to repay the complete costs of their
education to the people of canada if they were not willing to use
the fruits of that education in Canada.  Not only this but they
had probably prevented someone else from gaining that education
who might have been quite happy to stay in Canada.

I thought about this a little while and have come up with the
following thoughts.  It benefits society as a whole if the general
educational level is increased.  People do not pay that much of
their educational costs anyway (although to them it can be quite
a large figure).  School is a full time job if you are going to
both do well and get through in a reasonable amount of time.

So a suggestion: make tuition free or nearly so as long as grades
are acceptable, i.e. give everyone who can benefit from school a
scholarship for their tuition. Allow people whose academic performance
is not acceptable to attend but have them pay the true cost of
the education.  Insist that people whose tuition is paid sign
a promissory note for the full cost of their education which would
become payable if and when they decided to leave the country on a
permanent basis.  I think there would also have to be some exceptions
to this, e.g. if someone could demonstrate that it was not going to
be possible to get a job in their field then they should be allowed
to emigrate at no cost, e.g. in BC the government started laying off
teachers and newly graduated teachers had about 0 chance of obtaining
a posting so a lot of them ended up going to California which seems
reasonable to me.  Also it is probably not reasonable to expect a
lump sum payment upon exiting the country but a reasonable payment
scheme in inflation indexed dollars at prevailing interest rates
would be acceptable.

Comments?
 


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