Premier Doug Ford had choice words for students expressing concerns over recent cuts to the Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP) Tuesday, telling them to “not pick basket-weaving courses” and to invest in education that gives people in-demand jobs.
Speaking to reporters at Queen’s Park, Ford said he received “thousands of calls” from students over the long weekend, who expressed concerns about the province cutting the amount of grant money students can receive through OSAP.
“I mentioned to the students, you have to invest in your future, into in-demand jobs,” he said.
“You’re picking basket-weaving courses, and there’s not too many baskets being sold out there.”
Get rid of OSAP altogether. Make university free and fully taxpayer funded and introduce negative income tax for students.
If AI is going to be arbitrarily deleting a bunch of fields, the concept of “in-demand jobs” is pointless. “Basket weaving” type classes might sound silly to stupid conservatives today but might be exactly what makes an AI-based economy tick in a couple of years (eg., a linguistics and philosophy degree might be exactly what you need if you need to be able to effectively set up and debug an AI agent).
Not to mention of course that the point of a university education is not “jobs”, it is to have an educated citizenry that is the bedrock of any kind of democracy. Conservatives have never understood the point of education in the first place. Fuck 'em.
Unless you’re talking about “free for domestic students, even more exorbitant for international students” then your idea would never fly. Free tuition for the children of wealthy foreigners paid for by taxpayers? You’d be lucky to survive your first term in office after passing that.
Ontario domestic students’ higher education is heavily subsidized by international students paying ultra high tuition right now. If you took away that source of funding and had taxpayers pay the full brunt (even just for domestic tuition) you’d have a revolt and would be routed in the next election, with a conservative who would totally dismantle the system.
You know who promoted this idea for years? Bob Fucking Rae.
Then he was elected Premiere.
Then he was elected to federal politics.