Quebec Students Outsmart Government in Online Tuition Wars

In the battle for search engine optimization, the young and tech savvy are dominating.

This is a plot made for the big screen: The young and savvy students out-fox the tired old politicians. Hilarity ensues.

This is what happened in Quebec shortly after thousands of students protested a pending tuition hike for college and universities. The kids fought the adults, and the kids won.

The Quebec government put up a website, quebectuitionfees.com, to spread the word about all the good things this high tuition means for students. The students responded by buying the domain quebectuitionfees.ca, and putting up a website with a very similar look; but a very different message.

“The $1,625 tuition increase has nothing to do with the quality of teaching or the value of a university degree. In fact, this fee hike (the largest in Quebec’s history) will force students to take on more debt, second jobs, or even drop out of school,” said the student’s website.

“The Charest government’s proposal directly compromises equality of access to the benefits of a university degree for individual students and hurts Québec society as a whole.”

In the battle for search engine optimization, the young and tech savvy are dominating. Their dot ca is garnering far more page views than the government’s dot com. This is despite accusations that the government paid Google $50,000 to skew the results in their favour. They have since denied that accusation and claim that $50,000 was the budget for the entire campaign.