Free tuition has been a hotly debated topic for some time now in many countries, including Canada. It’s in the best interest of millions of people to provide free tuition, as it means equal access to education for all.
Free tuition also promotes education and fixes a broken system of teaching that focuses more on research than it does on producing well-rounded alumni.
Free tuition promotes education by ensuring everyone can have equal access to opportunities that were previously accessible only to the privileged. Charging tuition fees perpetuates the divide between the rich and the poor by creating the barrier of student debt. Families with lower household incomes automatically spend more of their household incomes on tuition than rich families do because the cost of tuition is the same for both, but their household income is not. Removing this barrier for low-income families would mean that the next generations of children from this background would have a better chance at lifting themselves up over the poverty line. If all students had to worry about were living expenses, that would take a lot of the stress and deterrence out of getting a post-secondary education. Generally speaking, people who get a higher education can also contribute more to the economy.
One argument against free tuition is that we would be supporting a broken system instead of fixing it. This is based on the premise that universities were created for the purpose of research instead of teaching, which means that many universities allocate a lot more of their money and resources toward research than toward teaching. While this is true, the system tends to fix itself when we introduce free tuition.
German universities, for example, used to be some of the top universities in the world. However, they have dropped in their ranking significantly since they have been offering free tuition. This is because there has been a shift in focus from research to teaching, and the ranking system is based on research and does not take into account other factors, such as teaching. So, by providing free tuition, the system starts to repair itself. Universities begin to shift their priorities from producing quality research to producing quality alumni.