Thank you.
About our organization, the Association of Nova Scotia University Teachers represents faculty associations of all the universities and degree-granting institutions in Nova Scotia, except for Dalhousie University and the Nova Scotia Agricultural College. We're also part of a broader coalition of organizations concerned with post-secondary education in Nova Scotia that includes CUPE Local 3912, which represents over 1,200 part-time faculty and graduate students, and also the Nova Scotia Government Employees Union, and the Canadian Federation of Students, whose representative spoke to you in the previous session.
My colleague, Dr. Lanning, from CUPE Local 3912, is unable to be here and has asked me to speak on his behalf, so I hope the chair might allow me a little bit more latitude in terms of time, but I will try to keep my remarks brief.
We would echo the concerns of our colleagues from the Canadian Federation of Students with regard to the need for a dedicated federal transfer for post-secondary education. We'd also echo their concerns with the unfairness of the system, which awards funding on the basis of provincial population rather than the number of students taught, which acts as a kind of reverse equalization payment where we're penalized for being a net importer of students in Nova Scotia. Those are concerns you already heard.
What I'd like to focus on is an issue that was raised in the earlier session, which was to do with the quality of education and how that's affected by underfunding. The problem we're facing is that while enrolments nationally have increased by more than 25% since the early 1990s, there's been no corresponding increase in the number of full-time faculty to teach them, and that has two effects. First of all, increased class sizes. We're hearing of classes where there are not enough seats in the room for the students to sit on. The students are forced to stand, or sit on the floor. I can't see how you can call that any kind of quality of education. But there's also been an increased reliance on part-time faculty to fill the gap, and that leads to some specific problems. It's not that part-time faculty are ipso facto inferior to their full-time colleagues. Many are just as well qualified, just as good; nevertheless, as my colleague points out in his brief, only roughly half the part-time faculty have a doctoral qualification, and that's a serious concern.
But there's also a structural problem. Part-time faculty are not provided with the resources that enable them to do their job properly. Often they have no permanent office space in which to consult the students. Often, in an era of increasing technological sophistication, they are not provided with computers. They are not provided with time or money to do research, and while many of them do do research, it has to be on their own time and on their own nickel. What we have in fact is a pool of highly qualified individuals whose ability to contribute to both research and the education of the students of the future is being compromised by the lack of resources. So I would argue—this has been my experience, having been teaching for the last twenty years in Nova Scotia—that there's been a real decline in the quality of education offered the students who are now paying massively increased tuition fees.
But that's only part of the picture. The other problem is what students are able to get out of what is on offer. As little as ten years ago, the expectation was that yes, students would be expected to work in the vacation to fund their education. They might have to work a few hours during the term, an evening a week perhaps, or work on the weekends. But now it's not uncommon to see students working 25, 30 hours a week, some even full-time because of the financial pressures on them. The effect I see in the classroom is that they simply are not able to get the full benefit from their education. I see good students going down in flames on an assignment because they simply haven't had the hours to put in to do the work required. And that's an intolerable situation.
The other thing that's a problem, however, is that while it may not be as efficient as some people would like, a lot of education is a matter of trial and error, finding out through experience that what you thought you wanted to do isn't in fact what you want. Any education, but a university education especially, is about changing minds, introducing people to new and unfamiliar ideas, and it's not uncommon, therefore, for students to change their direction in midstream as they begin to get some sense of where their real path lies. I know that was my own experience as a student.
Now that's what it should be like, but increasingly what we find now is that it's more and more difficult to do that when the financial consequences of taking an extra year or several more courses is a major addition to an already crippling debt load. More and more students are being driven not by intellectual curiosity but by the need to pursue courses of study most likely to lead to careers well enough paid to enable them to pay off their debts.
My final point is that I think the real crime is that many of us hold the old-fashioned view that we'd like to see our children have better opportunities than we had. Now, I suggest, we're giving them worse. If you see tuition fees for what they are--an alternative form of taxation--the increase of over 180% since the early 1990s represents a staggering redistribution of wealth, not from the rich to the poor or from the poor to the rich so much as from the young to the old. We are making a priority of tax cuts that benefit our own generation, and we ensure the cost of them is borne in large measure by our children.
We believe that policies whose effect is to line our own pockets at the expense of our children cannot be justified. That is a legacy that no responsible policy-maker would want to leave to the future. That is the reason for the recommendations we've outlined in our brief.
Thank you very much.