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Under the current circumstances, with the issue of university underfunding being questioned by various parties, we thought it pertinent to recall two studies made public by CREPUQ, one in 2002 and the other in 2010, both of which illustrated the situation very clearly.
The methodology for the 2002 study was developed by a work group in which the Minister of Education participated and which was validated by Raymond, Chabot, Grant and Thornton (RCGT). For the 2010 study, the methodology and results were confirmed by the Centre interuniversitaire de recherche en analyse des organisations (CIRANO). The data are from Statistics Canada and the Canadian Association of University Business Officers (CAUBO), and may thus be considered valid. University underfunding has been discussed widely in recent decades and the issue has been acknowledged repeatedly by parliamentary committees in 2004, 2007 and 2011. All political parties that participated in these processes have recognized the problem, as have all student associations on numerous occasions, as recently as 2010.
All claims that universities are not underfunded are based on the same argument: when you add capital and research budgets to operating budgets, Quebec universities receive more money per student than the Canadian average. This is a fact, but the reasoning is faulty and leads to a misrepresentation of the truth. Here is why. No university may transfer funds from its research budget to its operating budget because almost all research funds belong not to the university, but to the researchers to whom the funds have been granted by outside granting bodies. When a researcher obtains a grant for a project, the money is paid to the university where the researcher is working, with the provision that it be used solely for completing the research for which it was granted. The money may therefore never be used to cover costs related to teaching. Furthermore, this “sum total” method of analyzing a university’s financial situation suggests that it would be acceptable to penalize research to benefit teaching. This is not the way to build a strong and prosperous Quebec! The research professors and graduate students whose work is funded by grants would be the first to suffer. As for capital budgets, these are intended to respond to the significant growth in enrolment, which has increased by more than 30% in the last ten years. In addition, buildings erected decades ago are aging and require renovating and refitting. It is in recognition of this inescapable reality that the government has analyzed the need and allocated capital budgets to our universities. As it happens, the 2011 Education Statistics Bulletin published by the Ministry of Education is based on this inappropriate merging of funds, which the authors actually acknowledge, noting that “it would have been desirable to present separate data for operating expenses (excluding research and capital expenditures)…” What’s more, student populations would have had to be weighted in order to make them comparable between provinces. The Quebec Finance Minister took these two biases into account in its report L’avenir des universités et leur contribution au développement du Québec (December 2010), which confirmed that, on a weighted basis, funding per student in Quebec was lower than in the rest of Canada, i.e. $17,454 versus $19,688. CREPUQ’s studies on underfunding are reliably rigorous. They are public and easily available (www.crepuq.qc.ca). All questions about them are welcome and will be considered carefully. The Higher Education Summit is where a new pact between Quebec society and its universities must be forged. If it is to be a true success, it must provide a viable and permanent solution to the problem of underfunding and improve access to a university education. CREPUQ intends to work closely with all partners seeking to achieve this objective.
DANIEL ZIZIAN Director General Conference of Rectors and Principals of Quebec Universities (CREPUQ)
