School days, school days, dear old golden rule days, have returned, and considering the high cost of tuition and the low prices of agricultural commodities, it might be time for Canadian institutions of higher learning to take a page from Lindenwood University.
The school in St. Charles, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, accepts hogs and cattle as payment for tuition, and has done so since 1999.
University president Dennis Spellman, a former Texas farm boy, devised the option so farm families suffering difficult financial times could still send their kids to school, the Kansas City Star reported in August.
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Tuition at Lindenwood is $11,200 US per year, but students paying with livestock need only supply about 15 300-pound pigs or two 1,200 lb. steers. It works out to about $2,200 worth of livestock at market prices, said the Star, (clearly they’ve got a different set of market prices down there), but that’s a deal any way you slice it.
Unlike campuses at Olds and Lakeland in Alberta and the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Lindenwood doesn’t have its own farm or livestock facilities. Instead, the bartered animals are slaughtered at abattoirs near their farms of origin and the meat is shipped to the university for use in its student cafeteria.
“I don’t want anybody dropping out of school because of money,” Spellman is quoted as saying.
Dropping out of school, or not enrolling at all, is a possibility or even a fact of life for many western Canadian students whose families rely on farm income to fund their education. Just last week a story from Lethbridge, where tuition in one agricultural program at the community college is $3,600, only 16 first-year students have registered compared to 43 last year. Either finances or disillusionment with agriculture as a career – or both – are the culprits.
And last week on this page, Grade 12 student Ramona Garbald of Gladstone, Man., told us her plans to fund post-secondary education by raising and selling cattle were in jeopardy as a result of the BSE crisis.
A check of prairie college and university websites reveals no mention of livestock bartering options. Limitations associated with government funding are the likely reasons, although the relative convenience of money versus pigs and steers might factor in as well.
Yet within the history books of our fine prairie institutions, surely there’s precedent for bartering goods in exchange for tuition.
If a school in Missouri can manage it, maybe it’s time our schools did too.
