An impressive 56 per cent of all Canadians have a university degree, college diploma, or a vocational certificate, according to CNBC; the highest in the world. Canadian higher education still has its faults: there are still certain populations that have easier access to higher education, and most of these people end up with swathes of debt. COVID-19 threatens to exacerbate the disparity between the haves and the have-nots of education, particularly in P.E.I.
We start with the knowledge that higher education on P.E.I. is slightly different than education elsewhere due to student sprawl. Elsewhere, students rarely live outside of the greater region. On P.E.I., many higher education students live across the province. As a result, P.E.I. experiences a large number of school closures when rural weather conditions (but not urban) are bad.
Unfortunately, these are the same people who will have more issues during COVID-19. Unlike hurricanes, we aren’t all in this together. Internet access poses a challenge for schoolwork as is, but the end of semester that was crushed by COVID-19 proves that this is a dramatic problem that could have been solved long ago.
In 2008, Bell made a deal with the P.E.I. government to deliver a minimum of 1.5 mbps download speed to rural Islanders. If this number means nothing to you, video calls are impossible, and the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission says that Canadians need access to 50 mbps download speed for proper accessibility. Recently, P.E.I. Premier Dennis King promised a remedy to this situation — the agreement to which allows for a timeline of up to five years.
We need a solution now. COVID-19 likely won’t have a vaccine for another two years, so much will go wrong without an immediate solution.
University students are being asked to learn from home on less than 1.5 mbps. Tuition is costly, and many students are going into severe debt to get an education. Students with poor internet access will work harder and longer to get the same amount of work completed, and may end up reducing the number of courses they do in a given semester to compensate for both the logistical and fiscal difficulties. Worse yet, some may have to cease altogether. When one stops schooling, at any level, it is often very hard to return.
As many universities are opting for online-only classes for the near future, the four big textbook companies (Pearson, Wiley, Cengage, and McGraw-Hill — who collectively dominate 80 per cent of the market, according to Vox), together with some professors, are about to leave more of the economically disadvantaged behind. These companies have gone digital, with more enticing offers for professors in the form of premade quizzes and assignments that can count towards a student’s grade. Some UPEI professors are already using these. Unfortunately —
and I’m not the first to say — this effectively means that students must pay to be able to access and do their homework, beyond paying for the course itself.
Moreover, quite often the big companies are not actually selling a digital copy of a book, they’re selling an access key or subscription. After the semester ends, access is lost. What if the student fails and needs to purchase it again? The inability to keep what’s purchased is an issue of trade justice, and acts as a type of gatekeeping to knowledge, limiting access after the fact.
I may not have the answers, but I do know that in order for education (and our economy by extension) to simply survive COVID-19, immediate and dramatic attention needs to be brought to the needs of Islanders immediately.
Choyce Chappell is a recent graduate of UPEI with a bachelor's degree in environmental studies. This piece is offered as an individual submission to the series of opinion articles from Trade Justice P.E.I.
