Thank you.
That was a bridge to my questions for Mr. Bélanger and Mr. Quadir.
There's this notion of quotas, where funding is attached to student population. I understand where you're going with it, but don't you think it would just incent institutions to juice their numbers, as opposed to looking at overall student experience? If we have a set quota experience, what would stop universities from just increasing numbers or counting virtual students, and not accounting for things like housing when we're in the middle of a major housing crisis?
That's point number one.
The second concern I have with quotas is that they might have a perverse outcome. I'll be very honest with you. The people who are in front of this committee the most—more importantly, in front of public servants the most—are highly paid lobbyists from the U15 Group. They have a whole advocacy group. They are constantly in front of public servants. I am not convinced a quota system wouldn't make outcomes worse for smaller institutions because of the lobbying presence of larger institutions, which could easily gamify a quota system that would work in their favour, putting a cap on the ability of smaller institutions to expand student experience.
If quotas aren't the be-all and end-all, what else could we be doing? Are there ways to perhaps decouple graduate student funding from professorship funding and look at having more access to rural institutions or colleges? Frankly, we're always looking at the rural versus urban metric here. Perhaps we should be looking at affordable versus unaffordable institutions, as well.
What else could we be doing? What else, outside of quotas, is a way to solve this problem?