Quebec tuition fees among the highest in the world

Surprise, surprise! As usual, the media has been giving us the wrong dope. 

This time, it's the intrepretation fed to us by the corporate media regarding the student "strike" in Quebec that has been going on for the past few months.

From the very beginning, our media, even the CBC, has entirely ignored the details of the students' position, to the extent that most of us, myself included, have been led to believe that they are probably being unreasonable. Rebels without a cause, as Jacques Villeneuve called them.

That's because, as the media has repeated dozens if not hundreds or thousands of times, that "Quebec already has the lowest tuition fees in Canada / North America" by far.

What the media has failed to deliever is a comprehensive comparison of our tuition fees with those in other countries besides the U.S.

I myself tried to look up this info and did find that one or two Scandanavian countries have nominal tuition fees. But I didn't readily find anything about our major G8 partners like France and Germany.

Finally, a day or two ago, the following link was included with a CBC story (120 or so days into the student strike):

http://www.studyineurope.eu/tuition-fees

I also found another so-called comparison today ~ this also looks like a "promo" for charging higher tuition fees, but the reality of low tuition fees in may countries is evident:

http://jimsheng.hubpages.com/hub/Comparison-of-cost-of-higher-education-around-the-world

So, bottom line, it turns out that the vast majority of developed countries in the world have tuition fees that are much lower even than Quebec's. Only the U.K. and a couple of other countries around Europe have tuition fees anywhere near as high as ours.

It is a known and proven fact that higher tuition fees work as a deterrent to low and middle class individuals pursuing an education (everyone's "I put myself through college..." stories notwithstanding)

So, what about it? Despite the extremely skewed presentation of the situation our media gives us, it seems that the Quebec students at least have a sound basis on which they are making their demands.

As a sidebar, we already know what a failure the U.S. profit-driven healthcare system is. U.S. healthcare costs being anywhere from 50-100% higher than all other countries, yet their life expectancy is substantially lower than Canada and many other developed countries.

Perhaps we need to rethink our approach to higher education?