The age of reproduction: The effect of university tuition fees on enrolment in Quebec and Ontario

Overview

Abstract (English)

The recent rise of tuition fees in many Western countries – among them England, the United States and Canada – is renewing interest for the effect of tuition fees on the access to postsecondary education. In this paper, we investigate whether increasing tuition fees reduces overall access to university in Quebec and Ontario, but additionally we try to answer the more complex question of whether the effect of tuition fees on enrolment is the same across social groups. We model the effect of tuitions fees on university access using the Cox’s relative risk model on individual biographical data from four cycles of the General Social Survey and aggregate data on Quebec and Ontario tuition fees spanning from 1946 to 2009. Our approach makes use of the non-monotonic variation of tuition fees over the period to disentangle the effect of tuition fees on enrolment from the general growth in enrolment that occurred over the period. It also allows us to test the equality of the effect of tuitions fees across social origin, language and immigration status and across time of life. We find that tuition fees decrease the hazard of enrolment when parents do not have any university education, but increase it when at least one parent has a university diploma. Tuition fee are also found to reduce the hazard of enrolment for French-speaking in Quebec and Ontario. Additionally, we find that the negative effect of raising tuition fees increases with age in all social origin and sociolinguistic groups considered. Our results suggest that tuition fees are a barrier to intergenerational mobility and increasing them may simply strengthen social reproduction.

Abstract (French)

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