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'Ill-advised and even dangerous': Think tank criticizes Alberta government's post-secondary strategy

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The Alberta government’s plan to transform post-secondary education is “ill-advised and even dangerous,” a new think tank report warns.

On Tuesday, the Parkland Institute, a non-partisan research centre housed at the University of Alberta, released a report criticizing Alberta 2030: Building Skills for Jobs, the province’s 10-year plan to focus higher learning on job skills and training.

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University of Lethbridge sociology professor Trevor Harrison, who is also a former director of the Parkland Institute, coauthored the report and said that the strategy proposes significant changes and cuts that will have a “radical and negative” effect on the province’s post-secondary education system.

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“Alberta 2030 means reducing education to immediate jobs training and not preparing students for the labour market of the future, or for preparation for the kind of economy that we want in this province,” he said.

Part of the problem with the strategy, he added, is that it cites misleading statistics from Alberta’s 2019 MacKinnon report.

According to the MacKinnon report, University of Lethbridge economics professor Richard Mueller said, Alberta spends between $5,000 to $15,000 more per full-time student compared to Quebec, Ontario and British Columbia.

But those findings, he added, which aggregate all post-secondary institutions, including community colleges and vocational schools, are misleading.

“For many reasons, these community colleges and vocational schools were put in small, rural areas, and they’re very expensive to operate,” he said. But once those schools are separated from the results, “the numbers are totally different” from degree-granting institutions, he added.

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“The numbers show that Alberta has higher costs in the college system, and not so much in the university system,” Mueller explained.

Rafat Alam, president of the faculty association at MacEwan University in Edmonton, agreed that the data from Alberta 2030 compares ”apples to oranges” in terms of per capita expenditure, and took issue with the plan’s mention of a performance-based funding model for institutions.

“It has been shown by academic literature too many times that performance-based funding does not offer any efficiency gain,” he said. “It is simply not effective.”

Alam was also concerned about the kind of graduates the Alberta 2030 strategy would produce in a post-COVID world needing economic recovery. Citing the Conference Board of Canada, a not-for-profit think thank that analyzes economic trends, Alam said the future of Alberta lies in a knowledge-based economy that depends on education, not training.

“What the university system is providing is education, which is more appropriate for a future diversified knowledge base,” he said.

Harrison added that Alberta’s economy has changed over the past 20 to 30 years, and that the oil and gas industry is not going to be a reliable economic driver in the future, given the unstable price of oil and the adoption of automation in the industry.

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While the Alberta 2030 strategy focuses on developing specific skills and training for an economy that is rapidly changing, Harrison said, university and college education can provide the kind of “deep learning” and critical thinking skills that will be important in the future.

“If Alberta wants to get ahead of that curve, and prepare our students for that future economy, we need to have a kind of fulsome education — the kind of thing that post-secondary universities and colleges particularly have been really good at over the years.”

In a statement to Postmedia, Laurie Chandler, press secretary to Alberta Advanced Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides, said the government engaged representatives from post-secondary institutes across Alberta, to create an affordable and accessible system designed to meet future economic demands.

She also cited findings from the Conference Board of Canada, which reported that economic changes have created a need to focus on lifelong learning where workers regularly update their skills, and that employers are working with post-secondary institutes to develop shorter programs to do so.

“There is also a need to remove unnecessary duplication,” the statement said, “and stronger pathways are needed to improve movement and transfer of students throughout the system, without having to repeat courses.”

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