I try to avoid being too boosterish about my own employer, but dollar-for-dollar, the value proposition offered by the University of Toronto is pretty difficult to beat, anywhere in the world. In my own department, for example, full-time undergraduate students from Ontario pay just $6,100 a year in tuition, while out-of-province Canadian students pay $6,590. (To put that into perspective, Columbia University, which is a worse-ranked university than University of Toronto, charges students $89,800 per year.) On top of that, we do no-bullshit admissions: no stupid essays, no IQ tests, no athletic scholarships, no racial gerrymandering, no legacy admissions; we don’t care about extra-curriculars, just get good grades in high school and we let you in. We also expand the number of student positions in response to population growth, in order to avoid provoking unproductive competition amongst the young.
The important thing to observe is that all of this is achieved in the public sector, since the University of Toronto, like almost every university in Canada, is effectively public. (It’s actually a bit convoluted, since many are private, non-profit corporations. They are controlled by the public sector because governments control tuition payments, and therefore control their budgets.) The fact that we are in the public sector is actually one of the reasons that we are able to offer the high-quality product that we offer. Obviously being public keeps the prices down, but it also allows us to avoid becoming craven in the face of pressure from students (and their parents). So we do not have to coddle students the way that American colleges do. We get to teach them what we think they need to learn, not what they think they need to learn.
The point of the previous two paragraphs is to lay out some of the reasons that I value the public character of the Canadian university system. It has its frustrations, but overall I would not want to see it changed. There is, however, one exception to all of this, which is McGill University. If there was ever a case to be made for the privatization of a Canadian university, this is it. I’ve been toying with this idea for a long time, but the recent decision by the Quebec government to, in effect, punish the English universities in Quebec for their success, by doubling tuition for out-of-province students, makes the case unassailable. (An out-of-province Canadian student in my field wanting to study at McGill is now looking at a tuition bill somewhere north of $17,000 – which, as many have noted, is completely out of line with what students are paying elsewhere in Canada.)
The problem with McGill is that, while most provincial governments are excited to have a world-class university within their borders, McGill’s success is actually an embarrassment to the government of Quebec. The reason is that the Quebec government desperately wants its French universities to be seen as world-class, and so the fact that they are being consistently outshone by McGill is a source of frustration and resentment. (Part of the problem is that the French in France are just incredible assholes to Quebecers, which unfortunately is not something that the rest of us can do much about.) As a result, McGill has been perpetually placed on a starvation diet, while money gets thrown at the French universities. The government of Quebec wants McGill to be the second-best university in the province (after Université de Montréal).
This was already obvious, back in the 1990s when I finished my undergraduate degree at McGill. It was sufficiently apparent that when I moved back to Quebec to work as a professor, I specifically chose to go to Université de Montréal, and not McGill, even though I find it much easier to teach in English. This was for the simple reason that, if you’re going to work in the public sector, it’s better to be at an institution that the government loves rather than an institution that the government wants to strangle in its crib. And I can assure you, working at Université de Montréal, you could feel the love. There was an essentially bottomless pool of money for so-called rayonnement intellectuel (a term that in practice meant “going to France and making us seem smart”). We had nice classrooms, lots of tech, free coffee, non-unionized graduate students to do all our work for us… it was great!
Despite all of this largesse, the government of Quebec has been unsuccessful in making Université de Montréal its marquee university. In part that is due to the peculiar (and in some ways inexplicable) power of the McGill brand. Much of this stems from the weird fact that Americans persist in thinking that McGill is an ivy-league university (“Harvard of the north”), rather than a gigantic public institution. (Canadians tend to err in the opposite direction, treating McGill as though it were no big deal, comparable to Western or Queens.) It didn’t realize how big of a deal McGill was internationally until I went to graduate school in the U.S., where for the first year I was invariably introduced as “Joe Heath, from McGill” just like my friend Joel was introduced as “Joel Anderson, from Princeton” (by comparison, my fellow student Daniel, who did his undergrad at University of Toronto, was never introduced as “Daniel Brandes, from University of Toronto,” for the same reason that Amy was never introduced as “Amy Allen, from Miami University”).
Whatever indignities McGill has suffered over the years, it seems that nothing can damage the brand. (There’s a long story about how McGill got that reputation – it has a lot to do with having pioneered the modern medical school curriculum, which was subsequently copied by Johns Hopkins and then became universal in the 20th century.) I don’t want to sound over-the-top here, but the McGill brand is worth literally billions of dollars. A lot of countries would kill to have a university with that kind of name recognition. And yet the McGill brand is currently a distressed asset, being held in the public sector by a government that has an active interest to diminishing its value. It stands to reason that if they don’t want to own the asset, and they’re not willing to manage it property, then they should probably sell it...
One other thing that is important to keep in mind – universities in Canada are becoming an important export sector. We tend not to think of university education as an export product, because the campuses are physically located inside the country. Nevertheless, anything that earns foreign currency is an export, and Canadian universities are now earning money hand over fist charging foreign students very high fees. Part of the reason we are able to do this is the value proposition that we offer. University of Toronto can charge foreign students in my program $62,075 a year and still be a better deal than Columbia. This is a very, very good form of economic specialization for Canadians, because it generates a lot of jobs that are quite far up the value chain. And University of Toronto is able to do this despite having a relatively weak international brand. McGill, by contrast, has a massive brand, which it has not come anywhere close to fully monetizing.
So here’s the proposal. People are already under the impression that McGill is an elite school, so why not set it free, let it become a genuinely elite school? It’s already privately owned and managed, all the government of Quebec needs to do is cut it loose. No more government subsidy or transfers, let them set their own tuition and collect it. McGill could cut back the number of students, jack the tuition up to $50,000 for everyone, and see what happens. My suspicion is that they would remain solvent (and the Quebec government would get what it wants, which is a reduction in the number of anglophones living in Montreal, and the removal of the ongoing irritant of the Université de Montréal being the second-best university in the public system). Moreover, I don’t think this would set off any sort of chain reaction that would undermine the egalitarianism of the remaining university system in Canada. I also don’t think it would kill us to have one genuinely elite institution of higher education in the country. McGill could become our national champion in the emerging global competition for higher education revenue.
(I’ve not mentioned the situation of Concordia and Bishop’s, which are also being screwed by the Quebec government. That’s because I doubt that it would be a good idea to privatize either. But with McGill gone, it might reduce the incentive to penalize the other two English universities in Quebec.)