The Costs of Inclusion: Debt, Migration, and the Privatization of Post-Secondary Education in Canada

This dissertation explores how the benefits of post-secondary education are affected by constrained public spending, wherein a growing burden of associated costs are transferred onto students.

In pursuit of this investigation, I engage a feminist political economy approach to develop and apply the notion “predatory inclusion”—or the racialized, gendered, and classed processes through which the extension of opportunities for socio-economic advancement to formerly excluded social groups undermine the benefits of access and reinforce privileges of more powerful actors. Informed by this approach, which highlights the expropriative character of the financialization and internationalization of social reproduction, my central contention is that the normalization of student debt and the growth of educational migration—each cast by governments and institutions as key to expanding student access—foster predatory inclusion.

This dissertation unfolds in 5 substantive parts. Chapter 1 provides an overview of my theoretical and methodological approach to comparing outcomes among domestic and international students. Next, Chapter 2 sketches the roots of post-secondary education’s role in addressing private-sector interests and constructing criteria for national belonging within the settler colonial capitalist Canadian state. Chapter 3 then evaluates the distinct approaches to privatization, adopted by four Ontario-based post-secondary institutions, that reallocate a disproportionate burden of the costs of education onto students. Against this backdrop, Chapters 4 and 5 highlight how two different groups of post-secondary graduates—domestic students reliant on government-sponsored loans and international students with insecure residency status—face higher odds of filling precarious jobs that more socioeconomically secure graduates, including debt-free domestic students, do not wish to take on.

Challenging the foremost assumptions of the social investment policy framework, which aims to balance neoliberal austerity measures with labour market activation strategies and demands for greater socioeconomic equality, this dissertation documents the significance of predatory inclusion in Canada’s public universities and colleges and its effects. In revealing how contemporary terms of inclusion in post-secondary education serve to reproduce social inequality on the basis of citizenship status, race, country of origin, socioeconomic class, and gender, my findings underscore the need for alternative policy directions designed to better serve low-income, migrant, and otherwise marginalized students.