McGuinty’s scholarship plan may not add up

Michael Rosen
Contributor

The news Premier Dalton McGuinty planned to set aside $30 million for foreign students to study at Ontario universities was met with mixed reviews when he announced it earlier this month.
For those who missed the announcement, the plan is to fund 75 foreign doctoral students with $40,000-a-year scholarships, with $20 million provided by the province and another $10 million from the universities.
McGuinty made the announcement in Hong Kong on Nov. 4. The announcement caught many observers off guard. Why promise scholarships for foreign students when Ontario students now pay the most for university in Canada, and average thousands of dollars of debt upon graduation?
Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities John Milloy suggested the ambitious new scholarship – named the Ontario Trillium Scholarship – will allow Ontario to compete with schools such as “Harvard and Oxford and Cambridge.”
Other pundits envisioned a regional “knowledge boom” in the vein of the Silicon Valley effect, thanks to an increased international profile for schools such as the University of Toronto (U of T) and University of Waterloo, who stand to gain the most from the plan.
Progressive Conservative leader Tim Hudak disagreed. He’s circulating a petition asking the Liberal government to rescind the plan, and instead put the money toward Ontario students.
Even the most optimistic may question whether Milloy and McGuinty really believe $30 million would put local universities, as well respected as they are, level with the preeminent higher learning institutions of the world, like Harvard and Oxford.
Those universities, who already boast lucrative grants such as Fulbright and Rhodes scholarships, appear to be far better positioned to lure the most talented graduate students from around the world.
Perhaps the plan should have intended to help Ontario compete with internationally prestigious, but slightly less celebrated, universities. The proposal raises questions about the very nature of academic programs in our society.
Their purpose may be a strictly practical one, namely to provide an advanced, modern education to local students, who by using the knowledge and experience they gain become more productive in advancing their respective careers, or it could be for the collective eco- nomic benefit that a sophisticated workforce brings to Canada in an increasingly internationalized global economy. It could also be – more loftily – for societal advancement through cultural and intellectual development. It could be any combination of these, or none at all, but this program will certainly do little to further these theoretical goals.
What does it do for the province? It arms leading research universities like U of T and Waterloo with an added weapon for their international recruitment efforts. These schools are confident more money means luring the most sought after students, who can better the university by bringing a more diverse student body, superior educational achievements and developing worldwide connections.
Helping universities, not to mention international students who get a free graduate degree, is not the same as helping the province and its residents. The province needs better justification for spending people’s money than something that sounds suspiciously like a vanity project. There are no guarantees these students intend to stay domestically.
With Ontario now spending just $45 million a year on scholarships for its domestic graduate students, $20 million seems a steep price to pay just to increase the profile of higher learning institutions and it does nothing for most of the other schools in the province, like York University, with a vastly smaller endowment and with thoroughly different institutional goals.
Whether the rosy predictions of the government come to pass remains to be seen, but many Ontarians might prefer to see their tax dollars spent not for university administrators and global university rankings, but on jobs and student debt.