Because it's a right:
About 36,000 post-secondary students in Quebec are expected to desert their classrooms Tuesday amid strikes over tuition hikes.
The strikes have been triggered by votes at universities and colleges, with students at some institutions choosing to use the tactic to apply pressure against the Charest government.
While less than 10 per cent of the province’s students have chosen to participate, the figure has grown considerably in recent days.
Let's see if I understand this logic. These students believe that post-secondary education is so important that they feel it absolutely necessary to skip class. Nothing shows how seriously you take something than shirking it completely. For their next trick they'll show just how much they care about beer by not drinking it for a week. Perhaps not.
The numbers here are indeed shocking. University tuition in la belle province is currently averaging about $2,200 a year. Much lower than in other provinces. Under the heartless cuts of the noted right-wing extremist Jean Charest, that figure threatens to rise to an astronomical $3,800 a year. These increases are set to be implemented over the next five years, so most of the current students will never pay the full $3,800.
This being a right-wing blog let's do a small amount of math. Not too much. It's early in the morning and Publius has to go work soon. Now the minimum wage in Quebec is $9.65 an hour. Not quite the princely $10.25 in Dalton's McGuinty's Ontario, but it's something. So if we take $3,800 and divide by $9.65 we find the number 393.78. That would be the number of hours you would have to work at minimum wage to pay for a year's tuition. That's about 10 weeks working full time. Sure there are required deductions you need to factor in, but this is a rough estimate. Not a negligible sum, nor an extravagant one either. Universities tend to end their final exams in mid-May, starting up classes again in early September. That's more than 10 weeks.
A disproportionate number of university students come from middle class homes. Many of those homes have two incomes, two cars, internet connections and flat screen TVs. University tuition is not means tested in Quebec and special bursaries are granted to those with low-incomes. Demanding cheap university tuition is essentially a bribe to middle class voters, charging them less than they can pay, while charging poor students perhaps more than they can afford.
Mostly middle class kids are being given a highly subsidized education so that, within a few years of graduating, they'll be making on average more than the working class suckers who helped pay their tuition. Isn't social justice a grand thing? You endeavour to help the poor but somehow you wind up helping yourself. Advocating socialism is it's own very profitable reward.
But look at it from the perspective of the professional university layabout. There is at every university a class of perpetual students. They drifted into the campus at about eighteen and have spent the following dozen or so years deciding on a major. This is an agonizing choice you understand. Should it be Gender Relations in Medieval France? Or American Racist-Homophobe Studies?
To that hardy band of actual students, those silly fools who come to university to acquire skills or because of a genuine passion for learning, the thirty-something undergraduate with sixty credits is a bit of a joke. Should these protesting students, quite a few of them I suspect are thirty-somethings majoring in agitation, get their way tuition will be free in Quebec. Should such a thing come to pass you'll see a lot more of these professional students on campus.
Cheap university tuition isn't a right, it's more of a life style choice subsidized by the taxpayers. Yet you can't entirely blame the students. This is how they've been raised. Their education is mostly free until they finish CEGEP (public), that's tail end of high school to you maudits in the ROC, and the vast majority have been given free stuff all their lives by mommy and daddy.
The nice teachers talked at great length about all the rights they have being citizens of what, someday, will be the Republic of Quebec. Rather less about the responsibilities that might be entailed by such rights. At some point a general familiarity with mathematics, science, literature and distorted history might have been acquired. Time allowing.
Having created these entitled little monsters, is it a surprise that they keep demanding more and more? They're simply doing what they've been taught.
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