Assessing the redistributive impact of higher education tuition fees reforms: the case of Québec
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In this article, we analyse the redistributive impact of a recent reform of tuition fees in Québec. We adapt Duclos et al.’s (Citation2005) methodology to a generalized Lorenz framework. Many policy analysts argued that maintaining low higher education tuition fees is regressive. We take a look at the empirical validity of this argument using data from Statistics Canada's Survey of Labor and Income Dynamics. We show the importance of using data to validate this argument. The results obtained allow for the conclusion that this redistributive argument is empirically not verified for the province of Québec. Acknowledgements We thank Mark Taylor and an anonymous referee for their comments and Mathieu Audet for assistance with the data. We also thank the Regroupement des étudiantes et étudiants de maîtrise, de diplôme et de doctorat de l'Université de Sherbrooke (REMDUS) and the Fédération étudiante universitaire du Québec (FEUQ) for having asked the first author to analyse the question. Notes 1See Johannes et al. (Citation2006) for an example of this. This appears to be true even in the context of a developing country. 2See Johannes et al. (Citation2006) for an opposite result in the context of a developing country. 3Following King (Citation1983), assume that y be pre-reform real income assessed using pre-reform prices as reference prices. In this context y is a money-metric indicator of welfare: in King's terminology, it is also called ‘equivalent’ income. As noted by King, the concept of equivalent income function is also used by McKenzie (Citation1956), Samuelson (Citation1974) and Varian (Citation1980). 4By the envelope theorem, this is regardless of whether the agent changes his behaviour following the reform. This is because income here is a money-metric indictor of welfare and not nominal income. 5This assumption is consistent with the findings of Vermaeten et al. (Citation1994) who show that the overall tax incidence in Canada is proportional to income. 6It is, however, possible to assume that there is a subset of indices with high inequality aversion for which this reform will be deemed as regressive by all indices in this subset. See Makdissi and Mussard (Citation2008).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".