The quick and dirty on how the SPP affects post-secondary education

Some thoughts about the SPP and post-secondary education, the whole point this blog was created. It turns out no American PSE stakeholder had any real inkling about this, but a couple of Canadians shared their thoughts with Meaghan and me.

More to come, of course, in article form. These are straight transcripts.

Peter Julian, NDP MP (Burnaby-New Westminster, B.C):

It’s generally a privatization agenda. The essential aim is to, as the proponents of the SPP have been clear from the start, the essential component of the SPP is to maximize profits. How do you maximize profits in education? Well, you shift to private-sector, rather than public-sector funding. You increase tuition levels, you put students more and more in debt, you dig them deeper and deeper into a hole—then you make money off students.

If you can make a private-sector education profitable by increasing tuition fees, then you’ve made money off the student there. Secondly, when the student is carrying that debt load—the student loan—banks make money off the student there. It’s carried right along the cycle. It’s essentially a way of maximizing profits at the expense of the youngest, most vulnerable members of our society. There is no doubt that when you have an overall agenda that covers 300-400 areas—if we believe the words of the bureaucrats who actually are there to implement the SPP agenda—that they are areas that will profoundly touch the lives of students and encourage a kind of privatization of education that makes education inaccessible to middle-class students and poor students—unless they are willing to go heavily into debt.

Seamus Wolfe, SFUO VP University Affairs:

Fundamentally, it poses a threat to education on several fronts, the first being the SPP agenda is hell bent on privatizing anything it can. So public education as a right, as a system, is a target of the SPP. It’s written in there. It’s not the first target, but if we don’t join arms for our brothers and sisters who are the first targets, then nobody will be there when the target is turned to us. So that is fundamental.

There are also all the larger economic issues that are driving these agendas; the same issues that Our Campus back home is dealing with: the corporatization of our campus, of our public spaces, of our intellectual landscape. It’s being defined by these agendas that are being led by the largest corporations in the world. So yes, of course education [is threatened].

Ian Brannigan, SFUO activist:

The SPP, basically, is just a way for the U.S. to gain even more control over a lot of things. Post-secondary education in Canada, compared to the U.S., is not as high. We went to Loyola today, and without a scholarship or anything, you’re looking at paying $27,000 a year. And that’s just ridiculous. That’s worse than law school in Canada. I think if we bring more American values towards post-secondary education, we could be in a lot of trouble.

Our education is somewhat subsidized. But I think the government would decide to cut its funding towards education, and then we’d be fending for ourselves.