COVID-19: More than ever, it's time to fight for free education

Manuel Rato

For many students, COVID-19 is synonymous with anxiety: anxiety about the accommodation they will probably no longer be able to afford at the end of the month, anxiety about their food and summer jobs so essential for making ends meet and paying higher and higher tuition fees.

Student loans: Can’t pay? Don’t pay!

In Canada, the average student debt sums up to $30,000

By KH

This article is an essay of personal experience in avoiding repayment of student loans from the period of 2010-2019. Read on to learn how you might avoid repayment, as one act in a broader struggle for universal free tuition!

Growing up in a single-parent home where we often couldn’t afford the basics, how I was going to pay for university was the last thing to cross my mind. Upon high school graduation, I got accepted to university, ready to start my academic career. I signed the student loan application without even a thought and was loaned $8,000 for my first year at 7% interest. I was 17 years old. Each year the debt kept piling up. At 21 I owed $33,000, and before I was even handed my degree I received a bill for my first loan payment: $600 per month. I hadn’t even graduated yet, and I certainly had no job prospects.

I researched for weeks prior to graduation, knowing I would receive a bill I couldn’t pay. I had heard all the horror stories: harassment by collection agencies, garnished wages, parents still paying off their loans into their 40’s and 50’s. I knew it was an injustice and that I would do whatever it took to avoid 20+ years of debt repayment for an education that is a human right. Nine years later I have not made a single payment, and the debt is legally dissolved. I now have a Master’s degree and am starting a PhD in the fall. Here’s how I avoided paying, and if you’re looking for a way out, you can too.

Unite for Free Education and Against Ford's Anti-Democratic Attacks

YCL-LJC at the Rally in Toronto on January 18th

By Peter Miller 

In light of the recent announcement from the Ford Government, which includes continued unregulated international tuition fee costs, cuts to student grants, cuts to public investment in Post-Secondary Education, and voluntary payment of fees for student-run organizations, there is no doubt the student movement needs to build as militant and united a student movement as possible.

It all started on Friday with a large contingent of people making their voices heard against Doug Ford’s attacks against students. The Canadian Federation of Students-Ontario organized the rally and took time out of their general meeting to protest with other students and labour allies.

The Right to Education vs. Capitalism

Drew Garvie

We students have the “privilege” of going to school in capitalist Canada in 2016 – an imperialist country during an economic crisis. Globally and at home, Capital is trying to rollback the gains of working people, built up over the last century, in order to place the burden of the crisis on the backs of the vast majority.

“Austerity” currently defines the policies used by the capitalist state to restructure itself and the economy. Corporate lobby groups and bankers hired by governments to write reports all say the same thing: “we can’t continue with the welfare state.” The goal is to privatize everything – to commodify and increase direct corporate control over all aspects of our society, in order to extract the maximum amount of profit. “This is the only path to recovery.” A recovery for who is the question! Certainly not for the millions that will be denied access to health and education, to decent paying jobs, to housing, to a life of dignity. Also, as this process takes place domestically, the same class responsible for it expands their wars and environmental destruction. This bigger picture explains a lot of what we’re seeing in the attack on post-secondary education (PSE) today.

The Student Movement, Class & Revolution

Jenna Amirault & Drew Garvie

The upcoming school semester brings about renewed opportunities for student mobilization, solidarity with labour, and the creation of wider coalitions in the battle against austerity. The need to organize militant cross-Canada action has been made apparent by all the bourgeois political parties’ failure to take student issues seriously in this election and their failure, more generally, to represent the working class as a whole. In today’s economy students make up a new generation of debt owners with little prospects of getting a job upon graduation and insufficient social services to lessen their economic disparity in times of hardship. Colonialism and institutional sexism and racism create barriers to education that are left unaddressed by bourgeois politicians. It is pressing that students organize to challenge the limitations of the current education system and work with labour to overthrow capitalism itself. But what role can students play in revolutionary action? Why is the demand for access to education important, if it is not in itself revolutionary? And why is student-worker solidarity important?

Tuition fees: How students are getting it handed to them and what we can learn

Drew Garvie

We hear a lot about skyrocketing tuition fees, but one of the challenges in the student movement is high turnover and a lack of historical memory. Which government did what when? And the most important question, which governments are never truthful about; why did they do it? Here Rebel Youth examines some short histories of tuition fee increases in five provinces in order to help understand the attack we are facing and what we can do about it.

#IAmAStudent: the student fightback at UBC

Rebel Youth presents an interview with University of British Columbia student activist Kelly Gerlings

Interview by Rozh Armand

RY: What sparked the #IAMASTUDENT movement? How did it start?

KG: In early October 2014, the UBC Alma Mater Society (AMS) [the student union] leaked a proposed 10% increase to international tuition and a 20% increase to 8-month contracts for on-campus housing. Quickly students began organizing and speaking about the proposals. Just as quickly it was understood that if the students were going to be heard, they would need to organize outside of the AMS. And so within about a week of getting the news, a Teach-In was held for more information to be disseminated, and out of this, the group “I Am A Student” (IAAS) was 'born', in a sense.

ASSÉ newsletter now available in English

By Geoffrey Vendeville,
The Link, Concordia

One of Quebec’s largest and more militant student federations is reaching out to anglophones by publishing an English-language edition of its quarterly newspaper for the first time since fall 2010.

The Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante is releasing the English-language version of its newspaper, Ultimatum, in the next two weeks, said co-spokesperson Benjamin Gingras.

“There is a massive number of anglophone students who are as affected by questions of austerity, tuition fees and basically the whole student condition. The idea is to be inclusive and reach out to all students regardless of language,” he said.

“These are issues that go beyond the language barrier.”

The awakening student movement

by Espoir Manirambona
Rebel Youth Magazine

(This article appeared in the Winter 2013-2014 print edition of Rebel Youth together with this commentary.).

Students everywhere in Canada have had it with high tuition fees and are working to build a united student fightback to make education a right, not a privilege.

In many other industrialized capitalist countries such as France, Denmark and Spain post-secondary education is largely free.  Poorer nations, such as socialist Cuba, provide access to education as a guaranteed right.  In Canada students must pay a great deal of money to get the education they need to pursue their dreams or just get a job that’s above the poverty line.

Corporations, of course, want an educated workforce but they are not willing to pay for it through taxes -- and are instead forcing the students and their families to pick up the bill. This «debt sentence» is made heavier by the low wages most youth earn; and doubly hard for aboriginal students, young women, and racialized youth who face additional barriers.

Most students, and a large section of the Canadian people, oppose this full-scale attack on access to education. The challenge for the student movement across Canada is to turn this sentiment into action and mass public pressure. Quebec, which last year saw massive, militant and united student actions that shocked the country, shows the way!

The case for eliminating tuition fees

The following document, produced by the Canadian Federation of Students - Ontario, outlines how free education could be achieved in that province. 

The flyer outlines long-standing government commitments for free education, as well as how it could be funded through existing programmes and progressive taxation. 

It makes for an interesting contrast with something RY magazine put online last summer: a document the Quebec-based IRIS think-tank group produced, arguing the same idea. For easy comparison, their leaflet is also below.

Technical note -- You can click on the bottom left icon to view the files in full screen: 

 

Free post-secondary education in Ontario: the case for eliminating tuition fees

IRIS - the case for Free Education

The case for free education: IRIS

IRIS - the case for Free Education