Early in my teaching career, students across Québec launched extensive protests against planned tuition hikes. Named Printemps Érable, or Maple Spring, these protests targeted a planned tuition increase by the provincial government. Over the next six years, annual tuition would have increased from US$ 2,168 to US$ 3,793 [1]. Especially striking was that these protests happened across the province and across the city of Montréal. The movement was not limited to students, but, as shown in Figure 1, these protests were joined by people of all ages and walks of life [2].
Today’s inequality stems from inherited wealth—gained through colonization, enclosure, and wage theft—enabling the powerful to shape wages and housing in their favor.
Protestors across Québec filled streets and even highways—but I was not among them. Coming from the United States, where education was already radically unaffordable, I was shocked by these protests. In 2012, four years into living in Quebec, our low tuition prices were still a marvel. To my eyes, the tuition hikes were reasonable. I supported students’ right to strike, and my toddler vigorously supported the nightly protesters banging pots and pans as they marched down our city street. Figure 2 shows a protestor supporter banging a pot from his front porch, but the protests struck me as unrealistic and worse, taking the attention away from more important social issues.
My thinking at that time was rooted in a strong belief in the scarcity of social funds. When there is not enough to go around, good management involves carefully rationing resources to maximize benefits. That is the ethos that drove me to study Technology Policy. In my graduate program, and indeed the field of risk analysis and public policy, optimizing benefits from regulation and governance always comes with the understanding that resources are scarce. I learned a powerful set of tools that absolutely can help to create better, more cost-effective outcomes for all. But what I failed to realize then is that increasing tuition prices is part of a broader attack on the very concept of public goods and commons.
Since grad school, I have explored a wider range of literature—from science and technology studies, and feminist theory to speculative fiction probing policy and public goods. This shifted my view of scarcity: once seen as inevitable, I now understand it as the product of inequality, systemic exploitation, and an economy that traps millions in precarious jobs. Independence is framed as the opposite of scarcity, where hard work supposedly leads to success. And while of course there are people who manage to become very successful despite childhood disadvantage, the stories we tell about that neglect to mention the role of luck in that success [3]. Today’s inequality stems from inherited wealth—gained through colonization, enclosure, and wage theft—enabling the powerful to shape wages and housing in their favor [4], [5].
More than anything, building the future we want requires the courage and hope to imagine something radically different from the world we live in now.
This realization—that higher university tuition specifically disadvantages people from less affluent backgrounds—should have been clear to me long before. In the years since the Maple Spring protests of 2012, higher education costs have increased radically around the world.
Subsidizing postsecondary education challenges the scarcity mindset that claims we cannot afford to educate all capable students. When education costs rise and government support falls, students without financial backing must choose between debt, overwork, or competitive scholarships. But with tuition, housing, and food costs soaring while wages stagnate, working to pay for school is increasingly unrealistic. Scholarship funds remain limited and often reward outcomes tied to broader categories of advantage; school performance itself is related to being born bright, or having attentive, educated parents, or access to good primary or secondary schools. Even athletic scholarships relate to both physical gifts and having access to opportunities to develop those gifts, which again depends on money, parents, or chance.
However, what I had most wrong was the role of protest in maintaining the province’s commitment to subsidized tuition for Québec residents. Students across Québec had long developed effective strategies to resist tuition hikes and push for bursaries, launching major strikes eight times before the Maple Spring, beginning with the Quiet Revolution in 1968. The “low” tuition that impressed me had more than tripled between 1984 and 1989 and rose again in 2012. Québec student strikes over the decades targeted more than tuition—they helped establish CEGEPs, which are tuition-free and replace grade 12 and first-year university. Protests also led to secular education and a network of French-language universities, advancing the Quiet Revolution’s goals of greater educational access and opportunity for francophones. Access to education, then, must always be understood within its local context.
Tuition may seem minor compared to genocide, authoritarianism, or climate collapse. I certainly felt that way during the Maple Spring, when protests disrupted my campus, but those efforts defeated the proposed tuition hike and stalled further increases, at least for a time. Their victory showed the possibilities in collective action. Without accessible higher education, those without wealth and parental support face limited futures. Insecurity has been systematically manufactured, including the severing of people from the land—land that once provided food and housing without wage labor [6].
This type of collective action can be incredibly effective—but it is also costly. This cost is not just economic disruption—although those costs can of course be high. Rather, protesters increasingly risk bodily harm when they participate in public demonstrations. There were hundreds of arrests during the Maple Spring protests. One student protestor lost his eye after being shot by police with a rubber bullet [7].
Recently, the authoritarian turn seen in the United States and elsewhere is also alive and well in Québec. The latest efforts to increase tuition have focused on radical increases for out-of-province students. International students already paid much higher prices than Canadian students, whether in or out of province. When those increases were rejected by the courts, the populist right-wing government of Québec refocused its effort on daycare by trying to remove the children of immigrants from subsidized daycare [8].
So, what can we do? Resist, of course, but just as importantly, imagine a better way. More than anything, building the future we want requires the courage and hope to imagine something radically different from the world we live in now [9]. Looking back at what past social movements have accomplished can help us reimagine the possible. While political action is urgently needed, it is our capacity to imagine new futures that may be even more critical.
Author Information
Ketra Schmitt is an associate professor at the Centre for Engineering and Society and an associate member at the Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering, Gina Cody School of Engineering and Computer Science, Concordia University, Montreal, QC H3G 1M8, Canada. She is also the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine and serves as a board member of the IEEE Society for the Social Implications of Technology. Email: ketra.schmitt@concordia.ca.
______
To read the full version of this article, including references, click HERE.
_______
JOIN SSIT