The Quebec government is proposing an increase in tuition fees for international and out-of-province students attending English-language universities as a way to protect the French language.

  • Thrillhouse@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    My question is how does this make economic sense.

    In Ontario my undergrad degree costs about 6k a year now. It cost 4k a year when I took it.

    How can the Province justify doubling the fees? Won’t that make people not want to go there and select somewhere else instead causing a reduction in the student population?

    I don’t understand how this isolationism thing will play out long term unless they encourage French-speaking Quebecois to have more babies (and they already do this) or unless they accept a lot more immigration from French speaking countries. Maybe they are doing this? I don’t know happy to be informed.

    I don’t understand how Quebec looks at other extremely isolationist cultures where the population is declining and there’s going to be some sort of crisis and goes “oh yeah, that’s what we want.”

    • Victor Villas@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      Won’t that make people not want to go there and select somewhere else instead causing a reduction in the student population?

      Having English-preferring students go somewhere else seems to be aligned with their goal.

      they encourage French-speaking Quebecois to have more babies (and they already do this)

      It’s understandable that this is not enough, they’ll grow up speaking more English than French. Most yougsters in Montreal seem to be fluent in English, so it becomes a matter of diminishing the forces that give younger generations more reasons to speak English day to day. One of those forces is having a bunch of student colleagues that only speak English and attend English classes.

      • Auli@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        And no matter what they do they well go online after school and be bombarded with English. I wonder when the great firewall of Quebec well come into play.

        • Victor Villas@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          Fair. Maybe all efforts will be in vain and sooner or later French is going to disappear from Quebec. I can’t fault them for resisting, though. Sometimes they go overboard and cross the xenophobic line, but this time… meh, ineffective at worst.