The provincial government had just announced its plans to tie a portion of public funding for post-secondary institutions to specific measurable outcomes such as “graduate employment rate two years after graduation, graduate median income, employers’ assessment of graduate skills and competencies, and percentage of recent post-secondary graduates who report that the program they took was worth the cost.”

“Our new approach,” explained then-minister of advanced education Demetrios Nicolaides, “will help ensure students are set up for success by encouraging institutions to produce job-ready graduates. Students make a significant investment in their post-secondary education, and it is essential we do everything possible to give them a rewarding career at the end of their studies. By shifting the focus to performance, we will ensure taxpayer dollars are being used in the most responsible way possible.”

But performance-based metrics, says University of Regina professor of education Marc Spooner, threaten collegial governance and institutional autonomy, lead to further cutbacks in public funding, and undercut “the traditional mission of educating people, not just workers, and contributing to social and economic development.”

At MRU, for instance, the faculty, students, staff and administrators on various internal decision-making bodies have decided that every degree should include liberal education requirements meant to provide students “a well-rounded knowledge base in a variety of areas.” But under the UCP government’s new metrics, unless these classes provide workplace experiences or earn mention on student satisfaction surveys, they are likely ineligible for provincial funding.

Never mind that “the world of work is transforming rapidly,” as Spooner says in an analysis of performance-based funding for the Canadian Association of University Teachers, and that employers increasingly require the “ ‘soft’ skills like problem solving, communication, interpersonal skills and critical thinking… where universities excel.”

As well, outcomes such as graduate employment rates and incomes: are nearly impossible to track; assume economic output as the only benefit of higher education; penalize the arts and basic sciences, despite evidence of long-term earning potential (and other advantages); and ignore that “universities do not control the labour market, and governments are poor at predicting future labour market needs.”

Based on that and more, I asked my fellow board members at MRU to reject the government’s new metrics and, by extension, the further commercialization of Alberta’s post-secondary sector. They refused.

I asked my fellow board members at MRU to reject the government’s new performance metrics. They refused.

Since at least the Klein era, and government-promoted “market-friendly” policies such as tax cuts, austerity, user fees and privatization, universities have been forced to adopt “private-sector management practices,” “a customer orientation coupled with consumer choice and branding,” “outsourc[ed] labour with casual, temporary staff; and emphasi[s on] greater output performance measures and controls in the name of efficiency and accountability.”

This descent into neoliberal-inspired corporatization and privatization was exacerbated by a unique feature of Alberta’s post-secondary system: rather than enrolments or the actual costs of programs, provincial funding for higher education is largely based on the particular whims of governments.

Traditionally, institutions receive annual block grants from the province for operating expenses plus additional moneys for targeted capital (and other) projects. Funding fluctuates greatly from year to year, making long-term planning difficult. Still, allocations are made through collegial governance, largely without external interference.

But the UCP government has clear plans to upend and transform the sector.

There are, says Spooner, “competing philosophical visions for education. On one side … education should encourage democratic citizenship, support community engagement and social activism, and foment an appreciation for the intrinsic and emancipatory value of knowledge. On the other side there is … an increasingly instrumentalized university that primarily serves corporate and economic interests.”

For the UCP, post-secondary (like the rest of society) exists solely for the benefit of the market and must provide conditions conducive to the maximization of corporate profits. In government, says the 2022 Parkland Institute report Higher Education—Corporate or Public How the UCP is Restructuring Post-Secondary Education in Alberta, the UCP has “implemented a multi-pronged strategy to remake the province’s post-secondary education institutions according to [a] vision … less as providers of public goods … and more as ‘businesses’ that should produce commodities and attract private sector investment.”

“[G]overnment funds,” argued premier Jason Kenney in September 2022, “should align with labour market demands…. That’s why we’re trying to retool the education system.”

Attempting to align government with the market is not new in Alberta. But Kenney and the UCP aim to push that alignment further than ever. He saw students, his biographer Jeremy Appel points out, “as units of economic measurement, judged by their ability to get a job, consume, start a traditional family and not ask too many questions.”

And, following the April 2019 election, they put their plans in motion.

The first step in the UCP strategy was to defund the provincial treasury through the passage of the Job Creation Tax Cut, which lowered corporate tax rates from 12 per cent to 8 per cent over four years. According to researcher Ian Hussey, Alberta’s major oil companies alone saved around $4.3-billion between 2019 and 2022. At the same time, the number of jobs in the sector declined by nearly 3,500.

With provincial coffers shrinking, the August 2019 Report and Recommendations of the Blue Ribbon Panel on Alberta’s Finances (a.k.a. the MacKinnon report)—prohibited by Kenney from including revenues in its analysis—unsurprisingly recommended massive public spending cuts to balance the provincial budget. “[T]here can be no increases in government expenditures for four years,” it concluded, “and in fact the provincial government will actually need to reduce operating spending by at least $600-million and substantially reduce capital spending.”

Post-secondaries, specifically, needed to “be cut to a level comparable to… Ontario or BC….  [This] would mean a reduction of operating grants by 10 per cent to 18 per cent below their current level.”

Between 2019 and 2023, provincial “funding cuts to post-secondary education totalled more than half a billion dollars,” a sum that, reports journalist Cailynn Klingbeil, “represents a staggering 31 per cent cut to funding.”

The flagship University of Alberta was hit harder than most. “To put the magnitude of the operating cuts in proper perspective,” Spooner explains, the cuts to the U of A “represented a 34 per cent reduction in provincial funding— $222-million less—that had to be reconciled in 24 months.”

This drastic slashing, says U of A professor Laurie Adkin, resulted in the elimination of “800 non-academic positions through layoffs and retirements… and estimates [that] 1,200 full-time positions will be gone by the time the administrative restructuring has been completed. In addition, the contracts of hundreds of academic teaching staff have not been renewed. Retiring faculty are not, for the most part, being replaced.” The government expected that “this huge loss of revenue” would be made up “by generating money from ‘entrepreneurial and commercial ventures,’ cutting operating costs and raising tuition.”

“Only a decade ago,” Adkin says, “about 66 per cent of the U of A’s operating revenue came from its provincial grants.” By 2025 that figure was down to 39 per cent, according to the Blue Ribbon Panel. Tuition and related fees, on the other hand, rose from 23 per cent of revenues a decade ago to 31 per cent in 2025.

The Blue Ribbon report also concluded that higher education must align with provincial government priorities (i.e., improving economic conditions for oil and gas companies), and, according to Spooner, “it is difficult to see … its recommendations for using indicators that sharply narrow the meaning of ‘performance’ to labour-market, industry and economic outcomes as anything but an ideologically based attempt to redesign the fundamental mission of Alberta’s universities.”

This led to the 2020 introduction of performance-based metrics.

And my resignation from the MRU board that February.

“The Board,” I wrote in my resignation letter to minister Nicolaides, “was abandoning its responsibility to act in the best interests, including the fiduciary interests, of the institution…. I can no longer remain on a body”—one responsible “for the stewardship of the University” and “strengthening Mount Royal’s reputation by providing our students with exceptional learning experiences”—“that has chosen to support a funding model that will devastate the sector, and the students we educate, for generations.”

I should have seen it coming.

Back in August 2019, the government had stacked decision-making boards with sympathetic public members, under the rationale that this change would “strengthen… financial oversight and connections to industry.” All told, according to the Parkland Institute’s 2022 Higher Education report, “[a]t least 42 of the UCP public appointees… (nearly 28 per cent) have important links to the oil and gas sector. That number increases if we include appointees from the corporate services and construction firms that rely on the oil and gas sector for contracts, or the banks and investment firms that finance and/or own shares in oil and gas companies.”

“In many cases,” suggests MRU faculty member and Canadian Association of University Teachers vice-president, Marc Schroeder, “new board members hold high-level positions at corporations that benefit directly from the UCP’s deep cut to Alberta’s corporate tax rate, which, at 8 per cent [after the Job Creation Tax Cut], is now the lowest by far among Canadian provinces.” For example, MRU’s new board chair, Alex Pourbaix, was then president and CEO of Cenovus Energy, a Calgary-based oil and gas company that raked in $21-billion in revenues in 2019 and, thanks to the tax break, contributed hundreds of millions less to the provincial treasury.

Pourbaix and his newly appointed peers on the board proceeded to approve tuition increases year after year after year, further shifting the financial burden for education onto already struggling students. Since 2020, tuition in Alberta has risen 32 per cent, “far outpacing the overall rate of inflation and eclipsing the national average of about 17 per cent.”

“University presidents, vice-presidents and other senior administrators—along with the UCP-appointed public members of the boards of governors,” the Parkland’s Higher Education report says, “remained silent, acquiesced to or even endorsed the [government’s] restructuring rationale without publicly questioning its wisdom or necessity. It appears that the UCP has succeeded in bringing the boards and the executives into alignment with its agenda.”

The UCP government’s vision is a post-secondary sector that serves the market.

In correspondence with me, Pourbaix was also quite patronizing, requesting collegiality following my January letter. “Please don’t worry that I’m going to be hard on you for your views,” he wrote, demanding a call that he never got around to scheduling.

“Honestly,” I replied, “I’m not worried about you going hard on me. I’m not on the board to make friends or connections, but rather to fight in whatever ways I can for MRU. It may not fit with what you think is effective for boards, but I will use every tool in my toolbox to advocate for the institution.”

But that proved difficult. Based on my experience, Schroeder is correct in his suggestion that “a university governance structure … directly accountable to a UCP-appointed board means that senior management cannot be relied upon to mount any meaningful defence of their institutions despite being their nominal leaders.” This was clear in their easy acceptance of a performance-based funding model.

COVID-19 slowed initial plans, but in April 2021 the $3.7-million McKinsey Report—Alberta 2030: Building Skills for Jobs—reiterated the government’s market-oriented vision of higher education. The purpose, the final document says, is “[t]o do everything we can to ensure that more of Alberta’s youth and workforce … are well positioned to succeed in rewarding careers today and tomorrow.” The sector, then, should focus on six main goals: “improve access and student experience; develop skills for jobs; support innovation and commercialization; strengthen internationalization; improve sustainability and affordability; and strengthen system governance.”

None of these goals relate to critical thinking, problem solving or citizenship, despite regular evidence from sources such as the Royal Bank of Canada’s report Humans Wanted: How Canadian youth can thrive in the age of disruption that employers actually want more problem solvers and critical thinkers, people who can express their thoughts clearly and effectively and who can adapt and adjust to the evolving circumstances of these rapidly changing times.

“Enshrined in the Ministry of Advanced Education’s ‘Vision 2030 agenda,’” the Parkland report explains, “the UCP worldview for post-secondary education privileges ‘industry’ needs and the commodification of teaching and research ahead of any benefit to the public interest.”

Adds Schroeder, “the overarching, single-minded goal will be the realignment of institutional priorities according to the interests of employers and industry.”

The latest step in this reorientation of higher education to serve the market was the Expert Panel on Post-Secondary Institution Funding and Alberta’s Competitiveness: Report and Recommendations, otherwise known as the “Mintz report” after its chair, University of Calgary economist Jack Mintz, that—finally!—recommended a formal funding model for the province.

Released in September 2025, the report acknowledged the status quo is in fact untenable, particularly given we “are looking at a 40 per cent increase in the size of the traditional post-secondary population” due to “the biggest youth population explosion in the past 50 years.” The authors suggest that since “the province has reached its fiscal goal… of bringing per capita spending on post-secondary education down to the average of the three largest provinces[,]… funding is [now] needed to keep pace with growing student enrolment and rising costs.”

They also recognize that post-secondary institutions “help build citizenship and provide cultural and learning opportunities for the broader public” and propose public moneys for base operating grants, IT infrastructure and targeted programs to attract the best researchers and projects.

Post-secondaries, the authors insist, “are better placed [than employers or employees] to educate and train students and respond to the changing needs of the economy… Faculty provide expertise to businesses, organizations and governments…. [I]nstitutions create demand for resources provided by the community and are a source of employment.”

All to the good. But as the saying goes, the devil is in the details.

The suggested funding model attaches funds to enrolments, a common enough approach, but it includes differential transfers based on “cost of programs, market demand and government priorities.” One could imagine that the arts—particularly the humanities and fine arts—would receive substantially less support than, say, business or engineering or, before the explosion of AI and the largely unanticipated shift in the labour market, coding.

Mintz, not unlike MacKinnon and McKinsey, also “focuses on outcomes, providing incentives and rewarding performance.” He suggests institutions receive a percentage of their grants if they meet government benchmarks in teaching, research and community engagement. The metrics suggested by Mintz include: employment outcomes and student and employer satisfaction surveys; commercialization, patents, licences and scholarly citations; and contributions to the workforce and local challenges, and financial support from companies and organizations.

Once again, none of these metrics consider critical thinking, problem solving or citizenship and engagement; they tie every outcome to industry and the labour market.

None of these metrics consider critical thinking, problem solving or citizenship.

The Mintz report also recommends raising tuition fees to cover the “increasing costs in institutions.” How much fees should rise, the authors suggest, should, like enrolment grants, depend on the area of study and, for the duration of a student’s program, be limited to 2 per cent per year to ensure some predictability. While this is perhaps preferable to the present uncertainty, where fees might jump 30 per cent over the course of a degree, governments can continue to assert their priorities by differentiating the cost of studies and can further devolve the financial responsibilities for higher education from the province (the collective) onto the “customer” (the individual).

It’s unclear how this strategy aligns with the goal laid out in the Alberta 2030 report to “ensure all Albertans have access to high-quality post-secondary opportunities.” Or how the  greater administrative requirements associated with performance-based funding—after all, we have to prove we meet the benchmarks—would allow the government, as the Mintz panel recommended, to “take steps to untie the hands of post-secondary institutions, reduce regulatory controls and unnecessary reporting requirements and focus more on the outcomes that institutions achieve for students and the workforce.” As the authors themselves ask, “If the province contributes less than half of institutions’ funding, how much control should it have over how revenues are spent?”

Based on this logic, shouldn’t students have a much greater voice in the budgeting process Corporations already do have such a voice through majority representation on the boards of governors.

As I told minister Nicolaides in 2020, in a statement that still applies after the 2025 Mintz report, “The model you have proposed will not provide the stable, secure and predictable funding required by institutions of higher learning to properly plan their offerings and services to best benefit our students and society; it will instead lead to constant uncertainty, reduced quality, more red tape and more pressure on our already struggling students.”

But the UCP government continues to care little about these outcomes. Its vision is a post-secondary sector that serves the market. That produces profitable research without pesky upfront investments. Or the annoying taxes that can instead enrich shareholders while individual “clients” pay the price. Run by institutional decision-making bodies stacked with ideological allies. “I consider advanced education,” said Myles McDougall, Nicolaides’s successor, in 2025, “to be an economic portfolio… an important pillar for economic development of our province.”

As a result of these provincial policies, higher education in Alberta is in trouble.

At MRU about half of our courses are taught by sessional instructors who, despite their advanced degrees (and massive student debts), get paid thousands of dollars less than we lucky full-timers to teach classes they must reapply for every four months. They receive no benefits. No pension. No job security.

My students are struggling to balance their education with family responsibilities and multiple part-time jobs that fail to keep pace with rising tuition and the cost of living. They stress about the grades they need to get into the “right” programs—nursing, education, engineering, medicine, law, business—and the money “wasted” on “irrelevant” general education requirements. In the post-secondary environment fostered by the UCP, these students are not being inspired to become critical thinkers and democratic citizens with “an appreciation for the intrinsic and emancipatory value of knowledge.” Instead, they are often taking degrees they hate, desperate for the job supposedly waiting at the end. Spoiler alert: it usually isn’t.

The funding model the Mintz panel recommends does nothing to address these problems. It only advances the UCP strategy to make higher education in the province into a sector that serves industry, not society (or even students).

If we accept, as Nicolaides said upon the establishment of the Expert Panel on Post-Secondary Institution Funding and Alberta’s Competitiveness, that “Alberta’s higher education institutions are critical to Alberta’s prosperity,” then we must demand autonomous, affordable, accessible, publicly funded education that benefits all Albertans.

Roberta Lexier is a professor at Mount Royal University, cross-appointed to the departments of general education and humanities.

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The students in my small program came from across the US—but also from India, the UK and the People’s Republic of China. (And in 1986 that was still a very rare thing.) There was even another Canadian—from Calgary. Stanford understood that recruiting foreign students made campus a more cosmopolitan and creative place. That, in turn, raised and maintained the university’s status both in America and around the world.

Today when I remember how thrilled I was to start my studies, I’m infuriated by the way America has politicized and weaponized the granting of student visas. For Trump it’s been a perfect three-for-one bargain. He has been able to indulge his xenophobia and prosecute his war on science and knowledge, all the while taunting and punishing universities that don’t bow down to his will and whims.

But while it’s easy to denounce Trump’s petty vindictiveness, Canadian politicians have also been playing political games with the issue of international students here. In January 2024 the Trudeau government announced plans to cut the number of international study permits by 35 per cent. The avowed reason was to reduce pressure on rental and housing prices, and to respond to the specific Ontario problem of cut-rate diploma mills that were luring foreign students with false promises. The plan apportioned student permits differently for each province, in some cases cutting the number of student visas allotted to that province by as much as 50 per cent.

Applications have plummeted. International students got the message they’re no longer welcome here.

There was certainly a problem, especially in metro Toronto, of small commercial colleges charging high fees for programs of dubious educational value. But to scapegoat foreign students for Toronto’s and Vancouver’s long-time high rents and housing prices was political pandering to populist prejudice.

Meanwhile, Alberta’s colleges and universities have spent years trying to recruit more foreign students. Those students pay higher tuition than Canadians, of course, which helps make up for cuts to provincial funding. And bringing in international scholars helps build an institution’s global reputation. Whether those students return to their homelands with new skills and credentials, or later apply to immigrate to Canada, the results are a win for Alberta and its standing on the world stage.

Almost 30,000 more foreign students registered at Alberta colleges, polytechnics and universities in 2023–2024 than did 10 years ago. SAIT in Calgary and Norquest College in Edmonton have seen the biggest increases. In 2013–2014 SAIT had 1,616 international students. Last year it had 7,743. A decade ago Norquest had just 153 international students. In 2023–2024 it had 5,383. The University of Alberta has the most international students in the province—more than 9,000 last year. But other schools, from University of Lethbridge to Keyano College, have also seen sharp rises in international enrollments.

The federal policy didn’t cap international enrollments in Alberta. We are still allowed to welcome more students. Nonetheless, many post-secondaries here have reported sharp drops in international applications—and school presidents have been quoted by the CBC as saying they believe applications plummeted because international students got the message they were no longer welcome in Canada. (Though I’m guessing homophobic and separatist rhetoric from Alberta’s government also hasn’t helped to win hearts and minds.)

Without international students and their tuition dollars, some Alberta campuses will cut staff and offer fewer courses.

I had hoped Mark Carney—an Edmonton boy who was once a foreign student at Harvard and Oxford—might change Canada’s unfriendly messaging. We could and should seize this moment to recruit top academic talent: undergrads and graduates who’ve either had their US student visas delayed or denied, or who’ve decided not to run the risks of being a foreign student in Trump’s America, subject to his mercurial mood swings. Instead, during his first prime ministerial press conference, Carney reiterated his vow to cap the total number of temporary workers and international students in Canada, to reduce their numbers from 7 per cent of the population to less than 5 per cent by the end of 2027.

What a wasted opportunity for Canada, for Alberta and for our post-secondary schools, especially our top universities. If we want to be prepared for the economic, social and security challenges ahead, we need to invest many more provincial and federal dollars in higher education, create more opportunities for Canadian students and open our doors to international students—not as an act of charity, but because they have so very much to offer us in return.

Paula Simons is an independent senator and the host of the podcast Alberta Unbound. She lives in Edmonton.

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Today is different. We’re standing beside University Drive, barred from the campus because we’re on strike. The word “strike” seems strange to me, alien to my role as a professor. I look around at my colleagues. Some are carrying placards reading “Fair wages for teaching!” and “Fair workloads.” Others are huddled over warm coffee and waving at passing vehicles.

How did it come to this?

That’s a good question, the answer to which goes back a few years and leads to some even bigger questions about the future of post-secondary education in Alberta.

Students supporting U of L faculty, March 11, 2022. Students wanted to go back to class, but they were also concerned about the direction the university was taking. For years they’d seen classes get larger, courses get cancelled and full-time faculty disappear. Photo: University of Lethbridge Faculty Association.

I started work at the University of Lethbridge in summer 2002. I had spent nearly a decade as a sessional instructor at the University of Alberta. I was, as is said, “long in the tooth,” even by the standard of most late-starting academics. Despite four published books and a teaching award, I was on the verge of leaving the profession. The insecurity of term-to-term contracts and low wages, with no benefits, made it difficult to raise a family, let alone continue to do research. Getting a position at Lethbridge saved my career.

My first few years at the U of L were a huge blessing. I taught a regular bank of courses. I supervised graduate students and taught independent and applied studies courses to individual students. I researched, wrote and gave public talks on various public issues. I worked with smart and engaging colleagues. My family and I became part of a growing community, involved in the arts, recreation and public affairs.

The drastic cuts of the early Klein years were in the rearview mirror. Alberta’s post-secondary sector in the early 2000s was growing to meet the needs of a young and expanding population. Undergraduate student numbers at the U of L increased and graduate programs grew. Our school was becoming a nationally recognized and respected institution for its teaching and research alike.

But things began to change. As always, the province’s finances were over-reliant on resource royalties. No government was willing to deal with the instabilities of boom and bust and the problems it created for public institutions. When the bust hit—as it did from 2014 to 2021—public services, including the post-secondary sector, felt the blow.

In the downturn’s early years, staff at Alberta’s post-secondary institutions, including the University of Lethbridge, accepted that there would be no increases to our pay. One year, we went without an expected cost-of-living bonus. Faculty knew we had a part to play in weathering the fiscal storm. Still, we also believed the provincial government valued faculty and our role not simply to train but to educate students to be critical thinkers and participatory citizens. Further, we believed our voices on decisions affecting the post-secondary system were being heard.

These beliefs vanished after the United Conservative Party’s victory in 2019. Elected on a platform of severe austerity, the new government showed itself fundamentally opposed to the notion of public services. One of its first acts was to commission a report into Alberta’s finances, with its findings already predetermined. The MacKinnon Report was intended to set the stage for cuts, and it dutifully argued that Alberta’s public sector workers were overpaid. But the report also ignored—because it was told to ignore—Alberta Treasury Board data showing the province’s fiscal difficulties are the result of low tax revenues, not high expenditures.

The MacKinnon Report was followed by a full-frontal assault on the post-secondary sector in the form of cuts. The operating budgets for Alberta post-secondary institutions shrank by 18.8 per cent between 2018/2019 and 2022/2023, or by $4.6-billion. The University of Lethbridge’s operating budget has been cut by 21 per cent since 2019/2020.

This was followed by Advanced Education’s release of Alberta 2030. That document lays out a 10-year plan for turning local post-secondary institutions into little more than skills-training centres, at the behest of business, and evaluating their performance based on numbers related to graduates’ employment—e.g., an institution would get more public money the higher its graduates’ incomes. The same document makes clear the government’s intention to steadily withdraw responsibility for funding post-secondary, forcing institutions to rely more on marketizing their research and raising tuition. It also portends a drastic transition from full-time faculty towards “just-in-time” teachers—low paid and replaceable sessionals—and a lessening of faculty input into program development and delivery.

As contract negotiations began at the University of Lethbridge in 2019/20, faculty were further angered by Kafka-esque ministerial directives given by government to boards of all post-secondary institutions. We knew the directives existed; the boards told us. But their precise details about wage limits were hidden and still remain so. Our faculty association was left attempting to bargain in a landscape whose boundaries were never clear.

By early 2022, grievances at Alberta’s post-secondary institutions were at a boiling point. On January 4 Edmonton’s private Concordia University went on strike. It lasted 11 days. Mount Royal University narrowly averted a strike through an agreement in principle on February 14. On April 4 Athabasca University faculty voted strongly in favour of striking, were locked out by administration, and reached a tentative settlement three days later. Today, labour relations continue to simmer at Alberta’s two largest universities in Calgary and Edmonton.

Sandwiched between these events, faculty at the University of Lethbridge walked out on February 10.

This was the first legal strike at a public university in Alberta.

The decision to strike is never an easy one, but it’s perhaps particularly hard for academics. We’d much rather be teaching, meeting with students or continuing research that in some cases we’ve been conducting for decades. But also, the idea of engaging in labour conflict is anathema to many faculty. This was especially true at the University of Lethbridge when I arrived there 20 years ago. It was a “small c” conservative place in a “big C” conservative region of the province. Today, despite the two-term electoral success of NDP MLA Shannon Phillips, whose riding encompasses the main campus, Lethbridge’s culture remains largely inhospitable to union activism, especially by academics, whom many Albertans view as overpaid and doing work that’s obscure or unnecessary. And yet, here we are. The strike vote held in early February was approved by an astonishing 92 per cent of all faculty members.

As the strike began, faculty had been without a contract for more than 600 days. To say negotiations between the two sides had not gone well would be an understatement; more precisely, they hadn’t gone anywhere. Every effort on the part of faculty to negotiate a fair agreement—one that also included many non-monetary issues such as workload and the recognition of instructors’ research and service in yearly evaluations—had been rebuffed. The board’s response had been to stonewall or say “there’s nothing to negotiate.”

We were a varied group of picketers: an assortment of faculty types, including sessional and term instructors, academic assistants, professional librarians and professors, and people of all shapes and sizes, genders, backgrounds and ages. We took up positions at three entrances to Lethbridge’s main west side campus. I was at site #1, the main entrance. Others picketed a small downtown branch, and still others the university’s Calgary campus. A mood of optimism set in—surely the strike would end quickly.

This was a new experience for all of us. Indeed, it was the first-ever legal strike at a public university in Alberta. Before 2017, academic staff in this province had been prohibited by law from striking. As our strike began, some politicians and U of L administrators blamed the previous NDP government for instituting a union-friendly law, but this was inaccurate. The legislative change had resulted from a Supreme Court ruling, dealing with Saskatchewan, that in turn made Alberta’s existing anti-strike law unconstitutional. Alberta’s NDP government had little choice in the matter.

It was also the administration’s first experience of a strike. Their first act, on February 11, was to lock us out. This was expected. Of greater surprise, however, was the imposition of unnecessarily provocative restrictions, including the loss of email and of physical access to labs and offices, thus disabling contact with our students and preventing ongoing research.

Administration told us we would be prosecuted if we stepped onto university property, but they wouldn’t tell us where the property lines are. They further informed us that porta-potties were prohibited. The Faculty Association drew a chalk line along the boulevard to demarcate the boundary, and porta-potties were brought in. Administration hired private security. They parked in cars, snapping photos of us. Wide-angle surveillance cameras, positioned high on posts like eagle nests, were also installed. Some faculty were offended by what they viewed as intimidation tactics. The mood quickly changed. There was a sense administration had declared war on faculty.

U of L faculty, March 11, 2022. Strikers wore orange pinnies and marched or waved to passerby, some of whom honked in support. Photo: Trevor Harrison.

The term “war” may seem strong, but it was in many ways an apt metaphor. The Faculty Association set up a downtown command centre. Each weekday, we—“the troops”—checked in for our assigned three-hour shift, three per day between 8:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m., for which we received strike pay. We were “commanded” by strike captains. We wore uniforms: orange pinnies. We marched or stood at sentry posts, waving to passersby; some honked in support. Each day, a small battalion of older colleagues occupied folding chairs at their roadside redoubt. We held high our chosen weapons—placards, some declaring our demands, some wryly humorous (“It’s so bad even the introverts are here”). Rallies were held, replete with our demands chanted over loudspeakers.

Lines of supply were organized. By way of a canteen, the association set up a table sporting coffee and sweets, but faculty and community members soon began contributing pots of stew, curried dishes and chili. Umami, a well-known local grocery and deli, provided sandwiches. A communications unit was also created, both to inform faculty members and to counter what members viewed as administration’s misinformation to the public, such as misrepresenting our salary demands and implying that the Faculty Association was the side refusing to negotiate.

We remained hopeful of an early settlement. Most of us believed Reading Week, beginning February 19, would provide the opportunity for sober, serious negotiation, and that we would soon be back teaching and in our research labs. But it didn’t happen. Hope vanished, replaced by anger. Many now saw the administration as engaging in a war of attrition: that it wanted to wait us out, to figuratively starve us into submission in order to balance its books with our lost wages, to perhaps even bust the union.

The mood on the picket line hardened. Our sense of solidarity and resolve deepened. You could hear it in the camaraderie between colleagues and see it in the determined trudge through snow and mud, pickets held high. We were soon buoyed by colleagues arriving from other universities in Alberta and elsewhere to lend support, along with other union members. Some community members and a few New Democrat politicians also dropped by. Especially, however, there were our students.

Young and passionate, they literally stood with us. Several carried signs of their own making: “We stand behind U of L faculty” and “No faculty, no future.” The students wanted to go back to class—online, for now. But they were also concerned about the direction their university was taking. For years they had seen classes get larger, courses get cancelled, and full-time faculty, whom they rely on for guidance, disappear.

For some students, however, the strike/lockout was also an education. Beth, a third-year political science student, noted the event’s role in group formation, a topic discussed in class. Chad, a philosophy major who is studying the language of couples conflict, similarly noted the applicability of his research to the strike/lockout.

Late February saw 30 students stage sit-ins outside the university’s administrative offices. They sang songs and demanded that the board engage seriously in negotiations to end the strike. The administration’s response was to install a camera in the hall. Otherwise, nothing changed. On March 12 faculty held a rally at Lethbridge City Hall in support of students.

The sense of solidarity on the picket lines grew. The atmosphere could even be fun. One professor came dressed in a T-Rex outfit, bearing a sign, “Let’s make a dino-mite deal.” We held a Mardi Gras breakfast, complete with pancakes. Some picketers came dressed up, with prizes for best costume. A student orchestra played steel drums; on other days, a horn section.

People brought their animals: dogs in abundance, a small cat on a leash. On another day, two retired faculty rode horses to site #1. Very Lethbridge.

It was now mid-March. We were standing in that seasonal dead zone between winter and spring—what a friend terms “sprinter”—a combination of snow, drizzle, sun and fog. The best days are warm (never hot); the worst are cold. I was glad for hand and toe warmers. On the first day of striking, a picketer had fallen on ice and been injured. The faculty association called off picketing for the rest of that day. Later, as temperatures dropped to freezing, picketing was suspended for a couple of days. But on better days we enlarged our perimeter. Some of us hiked over the bridge on Whoop-Up Drive, the main thoroughfare joining west Lethbridge to our downtown campus. We carried flags and signs, braced like sails against the Lethbridge winds. It felt good.

We continued to march, to raise our voices and our signs. Was anyone listening?

Term-to-term contracts and low wages, with no benefits, make it difficult for an academic to raise a family.

Every conflict has multiple causes. Letters in the Lethbridge Herald suggested some members of the public thought we were striking over wages. This was true only to a point. Faculty salaries at the U of L have fallen steadily against inflation and by comparison with similar institutions over the past decade. But several of us on the picket line were recently retired or—like myself—are soon to be retired. We were there out of loyalty to an institution we helped build and out of a sense of fairness betrayed.

Money does matter a great deal to some faculty, however, especially to our sessional and instructor colleagues. Take the case of Bruce. He has taught multiple courses in three different departments over nearly a decade, with no marking support. He’s an academic Swiss army knife, ready to step in and teach courses at a moment’s notice. Administration gives him lots of praise, but no security and only a meagre paycheque with no benefits. (As negotiations began, the yearly salary of the highest-paid sessional instructor was $39,000.) Bruce supplements his salary by teaching at a nearby college and by writing independent reports.

Term instructors are not much better off than sessional teachers: only slightly more job security and slightly higher pay, with benefits. But they too are overworked—teaching seven to eight course equivalents per year, often requiring new preparations—and underappreciated, with no credit for writing and research, though many do it. One long-term instructor informed me during the strike/lockout that strike pay meant she would likely pocket more money during the dispute than when she was teaching! Sessional teachers did comparatively even better, some earning three times their usual salary.

So, yes, money does matter for some individual faculty. But the issue was also one of fairness and equity. And many of us fear post-secondary institutions cannot survive if faculty are reduced to underpaid, overworked, transient members of the precariat.

One prominent picket sign read “Respect, Equity, Parity.” I heard that first word repeatedly as I walked the line. A sense of disrespect by government and administration permeated talk. Long-time faculty spoke of decision-making being increasingly top-down and non-collegial. Administrative appointments made without significant faculty input was a particular sore point.

Things had come to a head during the year leading up to the strike/lockout, when administration had presented to faculty its restructuring plans meant to deal with the government budget cuts. The process involved numerous task forces, meetings and presentations, gestures that administration viewed as consultation but which many faculty felt were highly orchestrated to reach predetermined outcomes. Many faculty especially doubted administration’s repeated claims that restructuring wouldn’t mean the end of certain courses and programs. While everything remains unsettled, the phony consultation contributed to a general feeling that faculty’s voice in decision-making wasn’t being respected and that collegial governance had to be restored.

Faculty felt “consultations” were orchestrated to reach predetermined outcomes.

Tuesday, March 15. Anger and frustration were rising. Rumour and gossip were rife. But on that day, spirits on the picket lines were also high. The Board and the Faculty Association were meeting through a mediator. Previous meetings in December and January hadn’t been successful, but the situation was different now. We had taken the measure of each other, and no one was winning.

The initial news was mildly positive and it soon got better. By Friday, March 18, a tentative agreement was reached. All that was required was ratification by both sides.

The strike/lockout officially ended on March 21. Over 90 per cent of faculty approved the deal. The Board agreed to destroy the surveillance video tapes. The Faculty Association agreed to drop the filing—made a few days earlier—of an unfair labour practice complaint. We returned to our “barracks,” relieved to be going back to our teaching and research.

What did the strike achieve Faculty, as a whole, made few monetary gains. But sessional teachers received an 8 per cent increase to their stipend, though the highest salary will still be only $7,020 per course. Instructors received percentage increases less than inflation, and not kicking in until 2023, but did gain a rise in their salary cap. Little progress was made on non-monetary issues, though we succeeded in defending some rights and benefits. And we gained recognition of the rights, privileges and responsibilities of faculty members to participate in the making of policies and procedures, as well as membership on a number of governing committees. Still, many faculty remain disappointed at the settlement and angry at the government and administration for having provoked a dispute that harmed students, faculty and the university’s reputation.

We held a final rally on March 21. It was likely the last time many of us will get together. When I drove by site #1 a few days later, I imagined picketers still walking, waving, holding signs: proud, undefeated. Sometimes you fight not because you think you’ll win, but because you have no other choice, and trying to avoid that choice only costs you something more: your self-respect. We faculty at the University of Lethbridge came out of the strike stronger, more unified and more determined than before. That solidarity may well prove to be the strike’s long-term legacy.

Trevor Harrison is a professor of sociology at the University of Lethbridge and a former director of the Parkland Institute.

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My first warning of the upheaval at Mount Royal University (MRU), where I teach, came in the form of a speculative email on March 12, 2020, the day after the World Health Organization declared a pandemic and the National Basketball Association suspended its season. The bureaucratic message warned faculty to get our heads around how we “might” teach remotely. As the contagion spread, my anxiety grew. Two days later—and in the same technical voice—the university’s president announced a “transition to alternative delivery.” There was nothing gradual about my change from lively, debate-filled classroom teaching to using sterile video communication apps from my basement office to deliver lectures to students with their microphones and cameras turned off. For professors and students alike, those first few days were like a dense storm. We could see only faint shadows ahead and had no idea what to expect in the wake of the lockdown.

What followed in the many months since has been a far-reaching experiment that dramatically altered how professors teach, how students learn (or don’t), exposed long-standing inequalities in post-secondary education and deepened financial uncertainty for the institutions.

Over half of Isaiah Haughton’s university experience has played out in the two-room apartment he shares with his brother. The pandemic forced the second-year MRU student to complete the last month and a half of his first year, and his entire second year, off-campus. “It was a big change for me,” he says. “It was shocking.”

It was bewildering for faculty too. Unlike my students—often nimble users of new technology—I wasn’t an adroit user of video-communication programs such as Zoom, Google Meets and Microsoft Teams. I wasn’t alone. “It wasn’t seamless by any means,” recalls D.A. Dirks, who teaches humanities and education at MRU. “I was recording myself, holding my camera in my face, doing my lectures. It was very low-tech.” Nearly three-quarters of faculty at MRU surveyed by the school in the fall of 2020 say they found it challenging to translate lessons or activities into a format that worked remotely.

The switch undermined professors’ efforts at teaching and stole time away from learning. Glitches and sometimes comical technology failures sparked banter amongst students using private messaging. Teachers became the learners, with students—“digital natives”—patiently walking their professors through turning on microphones or sharing PowerPoint slides. For Haughton and other students, it was frustrating.

Students—digital natives—patiently walked their professors through turning on their microphones or sharing their slides with the class.

Distant, secluded, isolated, lonely. The disconnected existence of remote learning became a bleak reality, rolling into the fall of 2020 and winter of 2021 as the pandemic lingered and classes remained almost completely online. Haughton desperately missed contact with students and professors. “I need to be in a classroom. I need to be around other students. I need to go to the library to study,” says the 24-year-old. “I’m a social learner. I need to talk to people… It feels a little awkward on Zoom.”

More than 8 in 10 students surveyed at MRU said learning remotely has proven harder than in the traditional classroom. Fewer than a third rated their online learning experience in the fall of 2020 as excellent or good.

Arts student Lauren Jacobson loathes remote learning. “I hate it. I hate it so much. I find it so difficult,” says the 22-year-old, who is enrolled at Alberta University of the Arts. Jacobson took fewer classes during the pandemic, holding off studying sculpture or other classes where students make physical art. “I just don’t feel it’s worth it to be taking more,” Jacobson says. In the pandemic’s early days, concern about viral spread prompted AUArts to shut down its wood and metal shops. Instead of creating art, Jacobson was limited to writing about it or sketching it.

On top of that, art was compressed from three dimensions to two through the medium of video classes. “You couldn’t interact with people’s artworks in a physical space,” says Jacobson. “It was always mediated through a screen, and that makes it very difficult. We don’t really have… productive critiques.”

Third-year University of Calgary neuroscience student Chaten Jessel dreams of pursuing research or heading to medical school after he finishes his bachelor’s degree. In year three of his four-year undergraduate degree he was supposed to learn how to do basic neuro-electrophysiology, which involves techniques to measure electrical signals in the brain. But his professor shifted the class’s focus from technique to computational neuroscience. Now, says the 21-year-old, “I don’t have those skills… and there’s not going to be a chance for me to gain those skills.” He’ll have to pick them up later, when labs resume on campus—or try to learn them on the job.

Experiential lab work teaches students to observe, practise and experiment. It’s essential hands-on training, allowing them to relate theory taught in lectures to what they actually see in a lab. Social distancing restrictions forced labs to change more than probably any other type of learning. At some universities, labs became much smaller and were reserved only for upper-level courses. Other universities moved labs online and turned them into simulation-based versions, using software to create immersive virtual learning environments so students could “recreate” real-life scientific experiments from home.

The heavy lifting of transforming science labs fell to instructors such as Ana Colina. With little notice, the microbiology instructor at MRU turned a usually hands-on exercise—showing students how to culture bacteria in petri dishes—into a video. She also showed photos of the microbial organisms reproducing and multiplying in laboratory conditions. Students were then tasked with assessing the morphology or structure of the bacteria. “Obviously aspects cannot be replicated,” says Colina. “We just have to accept that.”

Teaching engineering students how to apply science became a lot less practical over Zoom. “I haven’t been a fan of online learning,” says Kylie Berkshire, a student at the U of C’s Schulich School of Engineering. The 21-year-old missed hands-on creative design and exploration work; Berkshire’s labs became a blend of computer simulations or videos of instructors performing tasks. For example, instead of actually building a physical radio that could receive electromagnetic waves as a final project in one of her labs, Berkshire had to make do with simulating a circuit diagram—putting the resistors and capacitors in the right spots—with software. She describes this as a disappointing “copy and paste thing from the lab manual” exercise. Before the pandemic, Berkshire says she was really engaged. She could visualize the exercises and took a leadership role during in-person labs. But doing the work online made it hard to focus: “I felt like I couldn’t contribute as much as I normally could.”

A nationwide survey conducted by the Canadian Alliance of Student Associations in May 2020 found that nearly two-thirds of post-secondary students didn’t find their remote experience equivalent to in-class learning. Nearly 6 in 10 didn’t think remote courses offered the same support—time with professors, tutorials etc.

Isaiah Haughton found online lectures monotonous, admitting he often drifted off. “I’m pretty much sleeping through these classes,” says the MRU student. “It’s not effective for me.” It wasn’t great for professors either. Lecturing to a blank screen upended the interpersonal interactions that usually come in classrooms. Decades of journalism and teaching have made me pretty adept at reading a room. But I found muted mics and turned-off cameras impenetrable. The usual organic cues that confirmed learning or confusion were gone. It was discouraging not knowing if my lectures were “landing.”

The pandemic also required patience, as everyone’s time got sucked up doing things that had previously been effortless. Opportunities to fire off quick questions about assignment deadlines at professors’ offices or as instructors were leaving lecture theatres changed too. Suddenly “you needed to send an email or schedule a time to meet,” says Laura Conrad, a political science master’s student at the U of C, adding it took time to hear back. And it was a lot more work for professors. My inbox, particularly in the fall of 2020, overflowed with mundane questions about readings, assignments and due dates. This sort of administrivia, as I like to call it, are things I remind students about at the beginning or end of lectures. All the information is also posted online. But for some reason students weren’t hearing or seeing it, so they emailed, and they emailed a lot.

There were other problems, including Zoom fatigue and spotty internet. Conrad, who was supposed to move from her hometown of Winnipeg to Calgary in the fall of 2020 to pursue her master’s, instead opted to stay home, where her Zoom seminars competed for broadband with three other people in her house also voraciously consuming bandwidth. A poor internet connection added a barrier for many students, especially those who went home to rural parts of the country. “Wifi is definitely annoying,” says Conrad.

 As COVID-19 took hold, the catchphrase “we’re all in this together” permeated political discourse and floated around social media. But the pandemic was not a great equalizer. It exposed and exacerbated a multitude of inequalities—class, race, financial, gender, LGBTQ+—that were already pronounced at Canadian universities. As institutions and dormitories closed, not every student went home to mum and dad’s house, where there was plenty of good food in the fridge and high-speed broadband to stream classes from their familiar bedroom. Some went home to full houses, others back to volatile domestic situations. Still more continued living in apartments filled with roommates. More than 4 in 10 students at MRU reported that they struggled to find an appropriate place to study.

As universities moved to remote learning, many administrators and faculty blithely assumed students had access to technology and reliable internet. Compounding this, the support services that many disadvantaged students rely on were no longer accessible on campus. Sure, some of the services migrated online, but not all were the same.

Universities, for the most part, are designed to help students on campus, says George Veletsianos, a professor at Royal Roads University. “Most institutions were not set up to serve distance students,” says the Canada Research Chair in Innovative Learning and Technology.

MRU psychology student Tyler Redgun knows this first-hand. He misses the support system on campus. “There were a lot of moments where I felt like I had to teach myself,” he says. The 24-year-old Siksika Nation student was unable to visit MRU’s Iniskim Centre, which serves Indigenous students and was “a big help,” says Redgun. He had role models at the centre and received “good advice” about navigating university.

The pandemic also created more financial uncertainty for students. Alberta’s United Conservative Party government has slashed spending to the province’s post-secondary institutions by $400-million since coming to power in 2019. The pandemic compounded matters, as revenues that would normally have come from international students’ tuitions and from cafeterias, parking and merchandise sales evaporated. Tuition hikes have further angered already stressed students. Many continued to pay their tuition by working on the so-called pandemic front lines, staffing grocery or pharmacy checkouts—if they kept their jobs at all.

Survey research conducted for TD Bank in the summer of 2020 revealed that young people, especially Black, Indigenous and people of colour, felt the financial impact of the pandemic hardest. That group was among the most likely to lose their job or have their hours cut because of COVID-19. The growing financial burden and diminished learning and social experience made many question whether it was all worth the cost. Haughton wonders if he could have made far better use of his time: “I might as well have just taken a gap year.”

According to a survey conducted by the Canadian Alliance of Student Associations, 7 in 10 students across Canada reported feeling stressed, anxious and isolated due to the pandemic. A sense of despair increased, with 82 per cent of Canadian students saying they worried about their future. Nearly every student at MRU, according to the university’s own research, said their mental health deteriorated because of fallout from COVID-19. Three-quarters of MRU students described being mentally or emotionally exhausted and having troubles concentrating because of the pandemic.

“Oh man, it’s lonely,” says Jessel, who studied remotely during the pandemic from his bedroom in Chestermere, just outside Calgary. Describing a Groundhog Day-like existence, Jessel relays the perpetual monotony of his post-secondary pandemic experience. Every day, he woke up, showered and then sat at his desk for about 14 hours. “I go to sleep, and then I wake up and do it again,” says the neuroscience student. “The biggest downside has been that loneliness factor where, you know, it’s just you alone in a room for how long?” A full academic year, it turns out.

Counselling at the U of C and MRU eventually adapted to online delivery to meet the growing need for mental health services. It was a bit clunky at first, says Michael Huston, a registered psychologist and a counsellor at MRU. “We thought there’s no way we could provide the same type of support,” he says. But it turns out counsellors were actually able to reach more students by moving online. “It’s just more accessible, and the counselling—the one-on-one [virtual] counselling—is equal, I think,” to pre-pandemic in-person therapy, he says.

Heightened concerns about mental health also created greater empathy. Curmudgeonly professors once rigid about deadlines and word counts were much less strict during the pandemic. Jessel says many of his professors bent over backwards with extensions and other offers of help to make sure students got through their courses. He says he confronted students who complained about “hopeless” professors who couldn’t get Zoom to work. “This is a hard time for everybody… everybody’s going through the same thing,” he remembers telling them.

Eight in 10 students at MRU felt professors remained positive and caring during the pandemic. D.A. Dirks was open with students about their own mental health struggles. The history and general education professor called it a “two-way street.” “I always say to students: ‘I’m a human, I’m not a robot. There are things going on in my life too… We should be kind to each other.’”

Many of the practices that began as improvisation at the start of the pandemic may become lasting features in post-secondary education. Some students enjoyed the flexibility of listening to recorded lectures. They could learn when they wanted. Pre-recorded teaching “does provide maximum flexibility for students,” says Dirks. “They can pace themselves… they don’t have to be sitting in front of a computer at a specific time listening to a lecture or meeting with professors and classmates in a synchronous format.”

For Jessel, the recordings helped him review and answer questions about material he didn’t understand at first. The pandemic also required different ways of evaluating students. Writing final exams in huge gyms wasn’t an option. Master’s student Conrad says she noticed less of a focus on memorization and more emphasis on applying theory and concepts. Exams became a blend of open- and closed-book tests administered through learning management systems such as Blackboard or D2L.

 “Some professors did great and switched over to application-based questions,” Jessel says, “but others seemed to use ‘open book’ as an excuse to make their exams ludicrously difficult.” This understandably created a lot of anxiety. “It also went against a lot of the test-taking strategies we learn as students,” he says. “We couldn’t double-check our work or skip more-difficult questions and come back to them later.”

 Remote learning, however, did allow some students to flourish, says microbiology instructor Colina. Some senior students impressed her with their grasp of her course’s online material. “They are always participating. They all have great ideas.” And Colina says she’s become more reflective about her own teaching. She spent a lot of time thinking about how students learn and the best ways to present her course material in manageable chunks. “I’m thinking about students going through the cycle when they are learning the subject… And that’s helping me better tailor my teaching style and tools.”

What Colina and professors like her did is improvise. And in making their courses teachable from a distance, they were following an example set by Athabasca University—based in Alberta—which primarily offers online distance learning, with its courses specifically designed to be online. In many ways, AU was pandemic-proof.

AU deputy provost Anne-Marie Scott jokes there wasn’t much fuss or muss at her institution when the pandemic forced traditional universities to close their classrooms and labs. “We are the post-secondary who changed least in the last year,” says Scott with a chuckle. AU courses typically come with their own website, constructed and tailored to help students learn independently. The university offers personalized one-to-one tutoring and telephone and email access to instructors. “We’re designing for digital and we’re designing for maximum flexibility,” says Scott. For example, AU provides students with electronic versions of textbooks or even mails textbooks and lab supplies, including boxes of rock samples for geology courses.

The perpetual monotony of a Groundhog Day existence: wake up, shower, sit at a desk for 14 hours, go to sleep, wake up and do it again.

“People have been coming to the realization that there’s much more to online learning than putting your lectures online or your PowerPoints online,” says George Veletsianos, who has been designing, developing and evaluating digital learning environments for nearly 20 years. Good online learning, he adds, is more than just shovelling onto the internet the usual classroom content taught in-person, and letting students do the work themselves. That’s what often happened in response to the pandemic.

Alberta’s traditional universities might learn something from AU. Scott is a big fan of offering multiple learning formats. She came to Alberta from Edinburgh University, which offers students a mix of both. “Online reduces barriers,” she says. “It recognizes that lots of different people learn in different ways.”

But Alberta’s wholesale transition to remote learning necessitated by the pandemic was done on a “shoestring budget” and the “backs” and “goodwill” of faculty, says Lee Easton, who teaches English at MRU and heads the Mount Royal Faculty Association. A lot of that hard work fell to contract faculty or sessionals, who had little choice but do the extra work or don’t get paid.

“It leaves you feeling exploited,” says Dirks. “You do the work because you like teaching and you like students and you like that interaction with students, and that’s all been removed… So, you’re in this situation where the reason you like teaching has been removed, and now you’re doing this extra work for no pay. It’s not great.”                 

Post-secondary administrators are talking about blending what universities did before the pandemic with some of the online technology used during the COVID-19 experiment. But that’s going to require intentionally designing a mix of both in-person and online courses. University professors retooled their classes because the pandemic forced them to. They did the best they could with limited resources and on the understanding that traditional teaching would eventually return.

“Online learning,” says Veletsianos, “is a powerful model that can work for some people, sometimes, in some situations.” But for many of us at Alberta’s universities, traditional in-person learning can’t return soon enough. 

 Brooks DeCillia spent 20 years at CBC. He teaches communication theory at MRU and studies public opinion at the U of C.

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While the Klein governments cut higher education funding by 18 per cent over 10 years, the UCP proposed to cut it by 20 per cent over four, beginning immediately. Post-secondary institutions would be expected to make up this huge loss of revenue by generating money from “entrepreneurial and commercial ventures,” cutting operating costs and raising tuition. The UCP subsequently removed the freeze on tuition increases that had been brought in by the NDP government, and permitted schools to hike domestic tuition by up to 7 per cent per year. In an additional blow to students, tuition and education tax credits were also eliminated in the October 2019 budget.

Klein cut higher education funding by 18 per cent over 10 years. The UCP proposed to cut it by 20 per cent over four years.

The University of Alberta has been singled out for much larger budget cuts than the province’s other post-secondary institutions. The UCP government’s February 2021 budget cut the U of A’s provincial grants not by the “average” amount of 5 per cent (the yearly amount needed to achieve a 20 per cent reduction over four years, or by 2023) but by 11 per cent. By comparison, the University of Calgary’s budget cut was estimated at 6 per cent.

As U of A president Bill Flanagan pointed out, this amounted to $60.1-million, or almost half of the total cut to the province’s post-secondary budget. He protested that “25 per cent of Alberta’s post-secondary students attend the University of Alberta, yet the province has required us to bear nearly 50 per cent of the reduction in provincial funding.” Since 2020, the university has had $170-million of its provincial grant taken away. To put this into perspective, the Campus Alberta Grant to the U of A for 2019/20 was budgeted at $671.3-million (unchanged from 2018/19). This means the university has now lost 25.3 per cent of its Campus Alberta Grant and been told to expect a further cut of $53-million in 2022–23. The loss of $223-million from a grant of $671.3-million will amount to a 33 per cent reduction in funding in just four years.Faced with such massive cuts to its budgets, the U of A has substantially increased tuition and other fees (e.g., for residence accommodation) since 2020. Newly announced fee increases in 12 programs (all in sciences, engineering, business, law, pharmacy, dentistry and medicine, including four graduate programs) range from 17 per cent to 104 per cent. The U of A Students’ Union estimates that the average undergraduate student will see a 23.5 per cent tuition increase over three years. For a government that claims to want to increase access to post-secondary education, shifting the funding base to tuition is a perverse strategy. Rising costs also worsen inequity for students who must attend university away from home, who have limited opportunities to finance their education through work, or who come from lower-income families. Following strong student resistance to the tuition increases, the minister of advanced education announced in late April 2021 that, following the three-year increases at 7 per cent per annum, tuition increases would again be limited to the rate of inflation. What this means for the financial viability of the U of A, which has had its government grant cut so radically, has yet to be determined.

To find savings, the U of A administration has so far eliminated 800 non-academic positions through layoffs and retirements since 2019 and estimates 1,200 full-time positions will be gone by the time the administrative restructuring has been completed. In addition, the contracts of hundreds of academic teaching staff have not been renewed. Retiring faculty are not, for the most part, being replaced. As a result, departments’ capacity to teach various programs or offer graduate supervision in certain fields is disappearing. Even core subjects may vanish from the curriculum if there is no one to teach them. Currently, faculty in Arts who taught US history and politics, Canadian and Alberta government and politics, environmental and social policy and other subjects are not being replaced. This knowledge is being lost to students, as well as to journalists and citizens trying to make sense of politics and policy issues in Alberta.

The administration hopes to find another $32-million in savings from procurement processes and shrinking the institution’s physical footprint—possibly by selling buildings or land. An extremely unpopular plan was announced in the winter of 2021 to demolish the last four historical residences that were built for U of A professors and their families in the early 20th century. Administrators say the university can no longer pay for their repair and upkeep.
To develop ways to provide essential services with 1,200 fewer non-academic staff, and otherwise reduce expenses, the administration hired an Australian consulting company, Nous (previously employed to restructure the University of Sydney—which had also been subjected to radical defunding by the Australian government). The U of A executive appointed selected individuals to a restructuring advisory working group, but faculty and staff associations were shut out of this process.

Briefly, the restructuring model adopted by the board of governors in December 2020 amalgamated faculties into three colleges, each of which will have a new executive dean and an administrative secretariat. The decision to hire executive deans was strongly opposed by the General Faculties Council (the elected body that represents faculty, students and staff, and is responsible for decisions on academic matters) on the grounds that it would create a new stratum of highly paid administrators just as hundreds of non-academic staff are being fired. This structure also appears to further centralize executive decision-making and turn faculty into employees to be managed rather than participants in collegial governance. This was, however, the model supported by the U of A’s president, its provost, some of its VPs and deans, and by the UCP-appointed public members of the board of governors.

The December 2020 board of governors meeting was a turning point for the university. We saw a board dominated by appointees aligned with the UCP’s neoliberal agenda assert its authority over the General Faculties Council in an unprecedented fashion. Many academic staff expressed a loss of confidence in the president’s leadership. And the restructuring model approved by the board is now well on its way to being implemented in an environment of anxiety for all affected. Valued colleagues who performed important jobs disappear from one day to the next, leaving gaps in services for students and faculty and increased workloads for those remaining. In the wake of such radical budget cuts, faculty and staff have little confidence that a university that had climbed its way into the top five in Canada will be able to sustain the depth and breadth of research and teaching that got it there.

The UCP also decided to implement new indicators for performance-based funding. Performance indictors aim, among other things, to link university funding to the commercialization of research, to funding obtained from “industry” sources, and to other measures that undermine academic autonomy and research motivated by non-market ends. The government sought to tie 40 per cent of an institution’s operating grant to performance indicators, with an emphasis on “labour market outcome-related performance measures.” These included metrics such as graduate employment rate two years after graduation, graduate median income, employers’ assessment of graduate skills and competencies, and percentage of recent post-secondary graduates who report that the program they took was worth the cost. Some of the UCP’s indicators call on institutions to influence outcomes over which they have little or no control; employment rates, wages and even the availability of work placements depend on what is happening in the rest of the economy.

As of April 2021 the government had slowed down the implementation of its performance-based funding model. Minister for Advanced Education Demetrios Nicolaides announced in March 2021 that the government would start by tying 5 per cent of operating grant funding, starting in fall 2021, to the number of “work-integrated learning” placements institutions negotiate with employers. The UCP government then released its 10-year strategy for post-secondary education, entitled: “Alberta 2030: Building Skills for Jobs.” As the title suggests, the strategy’s focus is job training for the anticipated needs of Alberta’s labour market. However, it also seeks to incentivize the commercialization of research, tying support ever more tightly to private sources of funding and market-driven R&D priorities. One of the initiatives proposed in the strategy document is the “adoption of faculty promotion and tenure policies to incentivize faculty to pursue entrepreneurial activities.”

The UCP government is promoting performance-based funding despite the failure of this approach. Considerable research is critical of the outcomes of 30 years of experimentation with the model. University of Regina education professor Marc Spooner recently reviewed multiple studies in an essay for Academic Matters. They conclude, overall, that such models have achieved little more than the bloating of accounting bureaucracies. Tying funding to government-determined metrics has perverse outcomes. For example, making funding dependent on research output measured by the number of publications per researcher per year both disadvantages disciplines that don’t use a laboratory model of research and encourages practices such as republishing the same data in multiple venues.

The U of A has been singled out for the largest cut—$223-million from a $671.3-million grant, or a 33 per cent reduction.

As another example: If increasing the number of graduates who will go on to have high incomes boosts an institution’s revenue, the institution is incentivized to expand its spaces for students in such programs (e.g., MBAs). Meanwhile, faculties whose graduates may go into environmental science, education, nursing, the civil service, journalism, non-profit social services or the arts will fall behind in this ranking.

Even within a faculty, pressures to expand some programs and shrink others might reflect the median incomes associated with various specializations. Attaching funding to such choices amounts to governments deciding which kinds of vocations and careers are valued and which are not—solely on the basis of how much money one earns in one’s chosen occupation! This valuation is completely divorced from the social usefulness or importance of the work performed by university graduates.

If we think this through a little further, to the ways in which gender, race and class inequalities are already mapped onto the labour market and educational opportunities, we see that these kinds of metrics will worsen existing inequalities. Consider that the occupations with the highest incomes (business, medicine, dentistry, law) are based in schools that already have the highest tuition fees and are the least accessible to individuals from low-income backgrounds. Funding based on such metrics could result in revenue being withheld from faculties that are more financially accessible but whose graduates typically earn less than certain professionals. These faculties are more likely to see their programs and spaces shrink over time, thus foreclosing opportunities for young people to pursue post-secondary education. Overall, performance metrics entrench more deeply the existing inequities within universities with regard to the resourcing and influence of different kinds of knowledge, and work against the goal of maximizing access to higher learning.

What does the performance-based funding model mean for the research that’s carried out at a public university? Well, first it distorts the decisions that researchers make about the research programs or questions they will pursue. As we see with the UCP agenda, performance indicators typically reward research that produces commercializable outcomes (e.g., technologies, patents) and attracts private-sector funding. One result of such policies is that STEM research is skewed in these directions, regardless of what researchers and their students understand to be the most important research questions. As my own research has found, this is the outcome of “innovation” funding envelopes for energy- and environment-related research at Alberta universities. While graduate students may be keen to work on, say, renewable energy systems or energy conservation, most of the funding for energy research goes into fossil-fuels-related technologies. That’s where they will obtain funding from research chairs, consortiums and institutes.

Or students may be advised that while they really want to study, say, ecosystem webs in old-growth forests, future employment opportunities are in the genetics of accelerated tree growth for timber harvesting. In other words, to secure a funded position in a research lab, they may have to change their course of study and anticipated career. Better known to the general public will be the ways in which performance-based funding works in pharmacology, biochemistry and agricultural sciences, where researchers receive funding from pharmaceutical and agribusiness corporations. The research priorities of these funders divert resources away from or even conflict with other research in areas such as preventive health, the elimination of environmental risks, or advances in sustainable agriculture and food security. Reliance on corporate funding also poses ethical and academic freedom issues and limits public access to research that is largely publicly funded.

A further result of the performance-based funding model is that areas of research that don’t always produce commercializable products, such as the natural sciences, social sciences, humanities and fine arts disciplines, see their funding shrink. Yet these subjects have always been critical to answering questions about how we can and should live in this world—and never more so than in these times of climate destabilization, massive biodiversity loss, rising authoritarianism and multiple social crises. Indeed, the combination of all these forms of knowledge is critical to tackling such complex problems. How else can we determine, say, whether it’s in the public interest to deploy small nuclear reactors to fuel bitumen extraction, or create a federal agency to fund green transition initiatives, or strip-mine coal from the Rocky Mountains, or reallocate municipal funding from policing to social services?

One of the primary responsibilities of a public university is to conduct research in the public interest, which means that research priorities must be driven by academics who are responsive to the needs of our communities—not by private interests or governments aligned with them.

Historical memory is critically important to making sense of what has been happening lately to post-secondary education. Higher education has long been on the New Right’s privatizing agenda. Since neoliberal parties were elected to government in the mid-1980s, the percentage of university operating revenues paid for by provincial governments has dropped from 81 per cent to 47 per cent. In Alberta, beginning in the Premier Getty years, annual budget cuts to universities have been the norm, not the exception. The three deepest rounds of cuts were imposed by the Klein governments in the 1990s, the Redford government (2011–2014) and now the United Conservative Party government. Only a decade ago, about 66 per cent of the U of A’s operating revenue came from its provincial grants, and about 23 per cent came from tuition and related fees. In 2020 the Ministry of Advanced Education’s business plan framed provincial funding of 47 per cent as a serious problem. When is a public post-secondary education system no longer public And what is a university for?

In a time of high unemployment, is it unreasonable for governments to want the post-secondary sector to offer vocational programs that help young people get jobs or that help retrain older workers Of course not. But this already happens. Of the 21 public post-secondary institutions in this province, 11 are comprehensive community colleges and two are polytechnic institutes. Two former colleges, Red Deer and Grande Prairie, are being transformed into polytechnics. The four comprehensive academic and research universities have professional schools and many degree programs in related areas.

Beyond the idea of “training” for specific jobs, post-secondary education develops a universal set of abilities that is important for employability in every economic sector. These abilities are the focus of an arts education. Employers need staff who can process multiple kinds of information, analyze complex problems and communicate ideas effectively both verbally and in writing. Indeed, many business executives and public administrators have arts degrees.

Perhaps the most important of the abilities that a core university education in the arts and sciences develops is critical and analytical thinking. This encompasses the capacity to grasp abstract concepts and complex interrelationships, to identify the assumptions underlying knowledge claims, to apply logical and moral reasoning, to discriminate between faulty arguments and solid ones, and to consider diverse perspectives on a problem.

Those skills in turn serve us in every other aspect of our lives, including as citizens. As citizens we need to be able to determine which news sources are credible, how various actors seek to manipulate public opinion, which policy options are the best suited to solving complex problems, or which political platforms best serve the public interest. As a scholar of populist far-right movements, I am convinced that the ability to analyze political discourse, as well as knowledge of history, the workings of media technologies and the political economy of media, are all critical to the survival of democracy.

There is no reason to believe that the UCP government’s ability to predict future labour market needs is any better than its ability to choose billion-dollar investments in private corporations. Yet it seeks to turn comprehensive universities into market-driven producers of workers and technologies. Was any of this necessary Not according to social scientists like me, who have argued for fiscal reform and reinvestment in public goods. But this is not the kind of policy work that the UCP’s old-new post-secondary agenda seeks to incentivize.

Universities do need reforming, to better serve the public interest and to be more accountable to those who work in them as well as to citizens. But the UCP-imposed restructuring of the University of Alberta and post-secondary education as a whole is anything but democratizing. Alberta’s system has been destabilized, demoralized and diminished.

Laurie Adkin is a long-time professor of political science at the U of A. Story feedback: letters@albertaviews.ca

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Shelly Wismath says yes

Dean of the School of Liberal Education at the University of Lethbridge.

The term “liberal arts” comes from the Latin liber, meaning free, and originally described the education given to free Roman citizens as preparation to participate in the running of their city-state. The original seven liberal arts included science and math (logic, geometry and astronomy), fine arts (music) and humanities clustered around grammar, logic and rhetoric. To the Romans, these were not separate subjects but were intertwined, as, for example, ratios of numbers related to music and to celestial orbits. The model of liberal education offered at the University of Lethbridge emphasizes this same broad and interconnected knowledge across all disciplines, with an emphasis on societal as well as personal benefits.

COVID-19 offers timely examples of complex issues that cannot be dealt with only by deep knowledge on a narrow topic. The pandemic has affected different communities, places and peoples differently, and addressing its impact requires knowledge from history, statistics, philosophy, ethics, business, sociology, math, biology and psychology. The development of COVID-19 vaccines is a superb scientific development, but the plans for rollout of the vaccines in Canada and in the world depended on many more disciplines: we needed ethical, social science, marketing, supply chain and logistics knowledge as we made decisions about who got vaccinated where and when and how. That the process relied on a diverse range of knowledge and skills underscores the absolute importance of the liberal education philosophy. Future scientists, for example, need to learn about the arts, business, social sciences and humanities, just as social scientists and humanists need quantitative skills and a grounding in what scientific evidence is and how it is used.

A broad and integrated education across a variety of disciplines that exposes students to viewpoints beyond their own majors both builds the individual and serves society. Beyond breadth, students in any liberal education discipline learn broadly transferable critical thinking skills. They learn to collect, organize, question and analyze information, to turn a huge mass of information into knowledge and wisdom. They practice using evidence and reasoning to form conclusions, and they learn to communicate these decisions in a way that can inform policy at a wider social level. These are crucial skills for employees in the 21st century, as many young people must prepare for careers that haven’t been invented yet. COVID-19 has only accelerated the pace of change, and strong transferable job skills will be increasingly in demand as employers seek people who can identify and solve problems in various contexts. Global issues such as pandemics and climate change also highlight the need for these skills on a societal level too, for broad and careful thinkers who can participate in decision-making at all levels, from local to global.

Ken Coates says no

Canada Research Chair in Regional Innovation at the University of Saskatchewan.

With enrolments in humanities and social sciences declining and interest in technical, health and business programs surging, many Canadians are worried. As a professional historian with a profound respect for the liberal arts, I too am concerned. Liberal arts students, pursuing a broad education not focused on specific employability, often enjoy rewarding careers. Defenders of the liberal arts eloquently promote the foundational academic disciplines, noting correctly their big contributions to the economic, social, ethical, climatic and technological challenges of the 21st century.

However, mandating a liberal arts course or two for all undergraduates will not set things right.

Breadth requirements have existed for decades. Students are typically made to take courses in sciences, languages, social sciences or the humanities. The arrangements are rarely reciprocal. Arts students aren’t required to take engineering, business or even fine arts electives, which is odd given the arguments for broad and comprehensive education.

Requiring all students to take liberal arts courses works in some cases. Engineering students studying ethics gain insight into human behaviour. On occasion, an accounting student will switch to a program in international studies or classics based on taking a mandatory liberal arts course. Routinely, however, students resent being “forced”—a common description—to take a class outside their major or degree program.

Institutions often mount special courses so students can fulfill a breadth requirement—for example in astronomy, biology or geology, to provide non-science students with a science credit. Comparable courses are offered in the social sciences and humanities, or students flock to introductory psychology or sociology classes. These address the literal requirements for academic diversity without reflecting the real spirit of the idea.

Liberal arts courses taught by strong instructors to engaged students can be downright magical. In the hands of a truly gifted instructor, a course delivered even to recalcitrant students can have a lifelong impact. But reality often falls well short of the ideal. Students taking courses they’d rather avoid often skip classes, focus on grades alone or resent the time “lost.”

In theory it’s a fine idea for all students to get a broad education, even though it runs counter to the current preoccupation with employability and practical skills. In practice, mandating one or two liberal arts courses in a program that typically runs to 40 courses over four years is unlikely to have a substantial academic or intellectual impact. In the end, aggressive liberal arts breadth requirements serve mainly to protect jobs and enrolments in the traditional disciplines.

Students must be prepared for a complex and fast-changing world. But minor adjustments to program requirements create more resentment than growth in graduates’ understanding. We can do much better than apply such a thin academic band-aid.

Shelly Wismath responds to Ken Coates

I was pleased to read Ken Coates’s remarks about how students should not be required to take liberal arts courses, or, more broadly, courses outside their majors. In fact I see his words as an argument for more and better such courses.

He’s right that students often don’t like such a requirement or learn much from an individual course, especially when it is arbitrarily chosen and doesn’t integrate well with their other learning. But at universities we build programs based on what students will need in their careers and in their social and civic lives. Universities thus have an obligation to provide engaging and thought-provoking learning experiences, in more (and better) breadth courses specially designed for this broader purpose.

The University of Lethbridge has been through exactly this process in recent years. Over 54 years we have evolved from a primarily undergraduate and liberal-education focused university into a comprehensive research university, and along the way lost our full vision for liberal education. By the early 2000s we were left with a breadth-only model of liberal education, although we required more than a single token course: each undergraduate student had to take four courses from each of three lists, Social Sciences, Sciences, and Fine Arts and Humanities. In practice this meant eight courses from the two lists outside of their majors. Students often chose their list courses based on easiness and timetable rather than intellectual growth, and didn’t get much out of them.

Our process of revitalizing liberal education since 2014, and the formation of the School of Liberal Education in 2017, addressed these issues. We have better articulated our vision of liberal education in terms of goals for student learning, and we have developed courses that allow students to explicitly work on those goals. We discuss how their courses and related experiences contribute to their development of not only career skills but engagement and citizenship skills. Beyond lots of “Intro to Discipline X” courses on the lists from a range of departments, we also offer a number of specifically liberal education-designated courses within the School, covering first year to final year and providing broad critical-thinking analyses of various topics.

Student appreciation of this model is shown in a doubling of our enrolment in our liberal education courses in the last few years. Students who take one such course very often come back for more.

We know that many students pursuing a broad education not focused from the start on a specific career goal do end up in rewarding careers. A 2019 Georgetown University study of 4,500 US colleges asked whether a post-secondary education is worth it and concluded, “based on earnings alone, yes, it is.” A Washington Post analysis of the Georgetown study determined that “over the course of a career, a liberal arts education is remarkably practical, providing a median return on investment 40 years after enrollment that approaches $1-million. That return on a liberal arts education is often not immediate or on a linear path… but over the decades of a career, it is solid.” (The Georgetown study acknowledged that “investing in a college education has greater effects on a person’s life than investing in the stock market… [But] it may take years for the investment to pay off, since the value of the degree lies in what a person does with it.”)

Tech industry CIO Rob Sentz has estimated that about 70 per cent of liberal arts graduates do something completely different when they go from their first stable job to their second. In a rapidly changing job market, that model of a career path is happening not just in the liberal arts but in all areas of study.

Universities have not always done a good job of articulating what their graduates bring to the changing marketplace. For example, universities value critical thinking and the ability to conduct research, which are not terms one would necessarily see in a job ad but are in fact important employment skills. They represent evidence-based reasoning capability: collecting, evaluating and summarizing information, checking assumptions and locating gaps in knowledge, identifying better approaches, putting together new conclusions, and then communicating and defending those conclusions. These abilities are valuable across disciplines and job categories and are also important life skills.

In any area of study, a university degree program is a four-year apprenticeship in learning to think. Any employer who wants employees to go beyond rote tasks should welcome the broad-based knowledge and skills described here. Our own University of Lethbridge alumni have told us that it’s your degree that gets you your first job, but it’s your liberal education that gets you your second and third jobs and builds your career.

And while careers are important, the value of a liberal education is greater still, encouraging our graduates to use their broad capacity as engaged participants in civic society at all levels to help build a better world.

Ken Coates responds to Shelly Wismath

I respect Shelly Wismath’s submission on the liberal arts and share almost all the convictions and ideas she offers. She does an excellent job of reminding us of the many and valuable contributions the liberal arts make to personal and collective development. But she strays well away from the main question in this debate: Should all university students be required to take a course or courses in the liberals arts?

Wismath seems to miss the irony in her first sentence, in which she connects the concept of the liberal arts to the Latin word liber, meaning “free.” She then proceeds to argue that classes in the liberal arts should be made mandatory, the opposite of “free.” I agree that students would benefit from advanced education in the social sciences, humanities and fine arts, just as they would all benefit from studies in the health, natural and physical sciences. A broad education is certainly valuable for all students and for citizens at large.

But that isn’t the question at hand. We’re discussing the merits and demerits of requiring all students, regardless of academic or professional program, to take a course or courses in the liberal arts. This is far from a new idea. Many institutions have had breadth requirements for decades, requiring students to take classes outside their majors. Arts students typically complete a mandatory science course—often a targeted class in biology, geography or astronomy but stripped of much rigour and substance (and often of the laboratory elements).

Mandatory courses are, at best, a mixed blessing. Students don’t like being directed into classes that aren’t, in their largely unschooled minds, relevant to their chosen discipline or career. Years ago, first-year students at many universities had to take an introductory English literature course, an idea that sat poorly with many of them. A broad list of courses, generally tied to writing requirements, gradually replaced the literature class, and many academic disciplines’ enrolment benefited from universities compelling students to take these classes.

Where I disagree with Wismath—and it’s a small but important distinction—is in her choice of words. She makes confident assertions about liberal arts courses. The students “learn to collect,” “practise using evidence,” “learn broadly transferable critical thinking skills,” and “learn to communicate these decisions.” Wismath is describing the ideal of a comprehensive liberal arts education, not necessarily the reality. She certainly isn’t describing the impact on students from a course or two.

It would be more accurate to say students have an opportunity to gain these experiences, skills and competencies. Some faculty provide many and diverse learning experiences, and most work exceptionally hard. But students can’t learn if they aren’t in class, don’t complete their reading and don’t participate in class discussions. Making a course mandatory doesn’t ensure that students engage fully and enthusiastically.

The reality of undergraduate education is often much different than the ideal. First-year withdrawal rates in all but the elite universities range from 20 per cent to 50 per cent of all entrants. Attendance is often poor. Professors routinely complain about students’ unpreparedness for class and low-quality work. Some classes have hundreds of students, with assignments graded by graduate students. Wismath argues students benefit from a liberal arts education. That is a far from uniform outcome.

But the issue at hand is much narrower than the broad contours of a liberal arts education. We’re discussing whether universities should require all students to take a course or two in the liberal arts. Put aside for now the fact that most programs already include some breadth requirements. Recognize instead that taking just a course or even two is not sufficient to provide the many benefits that can come from a comprehensive liberal arts program. Further, because students resent mandatory liberal arts courses, universities either produce a smorgasbord of courses to meet the requirement or a course specially designed for non-liberal-arts students, in both cases limiting the effectiveness of this effort at intellectual breadth and social preparation.

Canadians must have an open and frank conversation about the prerequisites for a well-educated and informed citizenry. Reading has declined dramatically. Newspaper readership and attention to TV news have dropped precipitously. TikTok, YouTube and Facebook are no replacement for informed and curated content. Canada has done very well in providing learners with pathways to academic credentials. But at a societal level, including the K–12 system, we need a serious examination of the fundamentals of education and social learning.

Wismath is correct about the personal and societal value of a liberal arts education. But the argument that making liberal arts courses mandatory will somehow produce a better-informed and empowered citizenry is far from compelling. Our broader educational system has lost its way. A tiny and compulsory step toward intellectual breadth won’t suffice to address this.

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Hugh Mackenzie says yes

Economist and research associate at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives

Free tuition would redress a massive intergenerational inequity created over the past 30 years. In 1990–91, average university tuition in Canada was $1,464; adjusted for inflation, that would be $2,541 in 2019–20. Today the actual average undergraduate tuition is $6,463. A generation that gave itself tax cuts and paid for them in part by dramatically increasing tuition has imposed a substantial economic burden on the generation that came of age after 2000.

Free tuition would recognize the escalating expectations for education in our modern economy and labour market. Canada’s approach to public education funding has not kept up with those changes. The legislature of Upper Canada provided for public funding of elementary and secondary education in the 1850s. By the 1920s, the mandatory school leaving age was increased to 16. Other than a modest increase in the leaving age to 18 in most provinces—essentially, requiring high school completion—our approach to post-secondary education funding is stuck in the economy of a century ago.

Free tuition would break down class- and income-related barriers to Canadians’ pursuit of a full range of economic opportunities. The combination of income-tested grants and loans that today purport to address those barriers do nothing of the kind. For most middle-and lower-income families, the sticker price of a post-secondary education is prohibitive, stories of students accumulating massive debts are frightening, and the promise of relief against those debts, based on the experience of the past 30 years, is irrational.

Free tuition would address the disturbing phenomenon of young people delaying family formation and foregoing home ownership because of overhanging education debt.

Free tuition would provide significant economic benefit to Canada. Post-secondary graduates are more productive, earn higher incomes, pay more in taxes, use fewer healthcare services and are less likely to depend on social assistance. Higher post-secondary participation rates are associated with higher living standards, better health outcomes and enhanced social and community engagement. Every Canadian is better off.

Free tuition would address Canada’s crisis of low participation in professions. High tuition in programs such as medicine, dentistry, law and business administration make those professions increasingly available only to upper-middle-income and high-income students. At a time when our society seeks to diversify professions and other well-paid occupations, the barriers erected by high tuition work in the opposite direction.

Making post-secondary education free would be an investment in Canada’s future. It would increase participation and help improve education standards. And by reducing dramatically the burden of debt borne by graduating students, it would support exactly the kind of entrepreneurial risk-taking that is so important for the future of our economy.

Kelly Foley says no

University of Saskatchewan associate professor of economics

Youth in Canada who have grown in the highest-income families attend and complete university at much higher rates than youth in lower-income families. This fact has been well documented. To the extent that it reflects inequality of opportunity, the relationship between family income and university enrolment should be cause for concern. There are also good reasons to believe that this correlation represents an inefficient allocation of public resources.

In the interest of equity and efficiency, should university be free for everyone I argue no. In the context of the current policy environment, eliminating upfront costs such as tuition for everyone will likely benefit high-income youth the most. It’s also a very expensive way to support and encourage low-income youth to enrol in university and is unlikely to substantially change the composition of university graduates.

Imagine a path leading to university enrolment. Steps along the way include getting good grades, finishing high school, applying and being admitted into university. At path’s end, just before entering university, lies a fence. Paying tuition and other direct costs opens the fence’s gate. Removing the metaphorical fence and making university free for everyone would benefit the students who were already willing and able to pay for university, among whom high-income youth are overrepresented.

The other beneficiaries of free university depend in part on who’s sitting on the “tuition fence.” To meaningfully change the relationship between family income and university enrolment, most people on this fence, or margin, would have to be from low-income backgrounds. Although changes in tuition have larger effects on enrolment among low-income students, the most important barriers these students face occur earlier along the path to university.

Research suggests that before students ever reach the barriers posed by the costs of applying for and enrolling in university, disadvantage and less “skills investment” in early childhood can represent a brick wall. Low-income families, lacking resources, tend to invest less in early skills development. Thus, the link between family income and university enrolment is largely, though not entirely, driven by factors that wouldn’t be ameliorated by making university free.

The development of skills and aspirations starts at birth. Skills investments made later in life are less effective, which suggests it could cost more to overcome the consequences of childhood disadvantage than to improve access to early childhood resources. Until youth are no longer trapped behind a “brick wall” that prevents them from even considering post-secondary education, untargeted free university will benefit those who need it least. Moreover, this policy would divert public funds away from the more effective strategy of supporting children from lower-income backgrounds at pre-school, primary and secondary school ages.

Hugh Mackenzie responds to Kelly Foley

Canada’s debate over rising college and university tuition has been ongoing for nearly 30 years. It’s not an accident that this period has coincided with wave after wave of tax cuts that have reduced the capacity of governments to pay for public services. In this context, it’s not surprising that arguments against tuition relief for students often amount to carefully disguised arguments in support of constrained fiscal policies. That is certainly true here.

To start with, the relationship between tuition and income is a red herring. It is a fact that participation in post-secondary education in Canada is positively related to family income. It is also widely accepted that the cost of post-secondary education is not the only barrier faced by students from lower-income families and that those barriers begin long before the point of decision about whether or not to attend a college or university.

That doesn’t mean, however, that tuition isn’t a barrier to participation by lower-income students in post-secondary education. And the point might have more weight if we were actually taking seriously the obstacles facing lower-income students earlier in their academic careers. We are not. In fact, the programs and supports that might address these obstacles have been victims of the same downward pressures on public services spending that have driven up college and university tuition.

High tuition is a real barrier to both enrolment and program completion for low-income students. For a low-income family, the sticker price is a real shock. And for low-income families who have become all too accustomed to support programs that evaporate in fine print or disappear abruptly as rules change or are simply eliminated in the name of cost-cutting, programs that offer financial support don’t help overcome that barrier.

For lower- and moderate-income families, attending a post-secondary institution starts to look like a shift from education to social assistance.

As tuition keeps increasing, the line that defines the cost barrier keeps moving up the income scale, with the result that families that might have been able to manage tuition costs a generation ago now face barriers that they will struggle to overcome despite having incomes above the cut-off for financial support.

This squeeze is most apparent in professional programs (e.g., business, engineering, medicine, law) for which tuition has increased even more rapidly than for regular programs. The children of middle-income families are being priced out of the professions, with potentially profound implications for Canadian society.

None of this considers the financial impact on students and recent graduates. Students struggling financially to stay in their post-secondary programs end up working long hours in part-time jobs, undermining their chance of success, and are more likely to fail to complete their programs. Graduates often enter an uncertain job market with mortgage-like debts, delaying family formation and limiting
housing choices.

Those who support the status quo fail to acknowledge that the financial barrier presented by post-secondary tuition is a moving target, inviting the question of where, if anywhere, the upward march of tuition will, or should, stop. Was it right, in Alberta, when tuition made up 10 per cent of college and university revenue in 1989 Did Alberta have it right in 2018, when the tuition share reached 24 per cent Or does Ontario have it right, at its 2018 level of 43 per cent?

Over the past 30 years there has been a massive intergenerational shift against young Canadians as their elders have chosen to pay themselves, in the form of tax cuts, at the expense of their children’s and grandchildren’s economic futures. This calls into question the claim that concludes the pro-tuition side of this argument: that relief from tuition “would divert public funds away from the more-effective strategy of supporting children from lower-income backgrounds at preschool, primary and secondary school ages.”

The fact that the question is posed as an either–or proposition amounts to a declaration that this intergenerational transfer is sacrosanct, and that in this context, when faced with a choice between providing tuition relief or supporting low-income students earlier in their lives, the choice will be to do neither.

And that brings us back to the fiscal policy issue that is the real driver of high-tuition in Canada. For 30 years, increases in post-secondary tuition have been the path of least resistance for governments looking to create fiscal room for tax cuts that have undermined our ability to pay for public services. The consequences for the future of young Canadians are profoundly negative. And in an economy in which our most important asset is the quality of our workforce, the consequences are profoundly negative for Canada as well.

Kelly Foley responds to Hugh Mackenzie

I share Hugh Mackenzie’s concerns about the many “class- and income-related barriers” in Canada that serve to perpetuate advantage and disadvantage across generations. I am less optimistic that eliminating tuition would make a difference. More importantly, I fear that free tuition could make matters worse.

Students from low- and middle-income families do face important financial barriers that public policy should address. However, eliminating tuition would not remove the need for a fair and effective student aid policy. Although, as Mackenzie points out, on average, tuition and fee increases have outpaced inflation in recent decades, and for most undergraduate programs living expenses are a large part of students’ annual budgets. For example, the University of British Columbia budgeting tool suggests that an out-of-province single student living in a shared residence room should expect more than $14,000 for living expenses per academic year.

For some groups, these non-tuition costs are even larger. Lone parents and those who live in remote areas are among the most underrepresented in Canadian universities, and have substantial costs that are not affected by tuition fees. Thus, whether or not we have free tuition, we need a financial aid policy that removes barriers for students who otherwise do not have access to funds to cover their direct costs.

Tuition paid by youth from high-income families, who are over-represented in university, leaves more funds to provide targeted grants that are large enough to cover tuition fees and living expenses for high-need underrepresented groups. Recently, in Ontario, the Conservative government enacted a reversal of that principle, by reducing tuition and eliminating grants that covered tuition on a sliding scale that depended on family income. This disproportionally benefits high-income families.

Mackenzie also argues that free tuition would make every Canadian better off because post-secondary education is associated with social benefits as well as better health and labour market outcomes among graduates. I agree that there are likely some spillovers such that people who do not attend university benefit from those who do, but it is not obvious those benefits are particularly large relative to the cost of free tuition.

With respect to labour market outcomes, it is only true on average that post-secondary graduates earn more than those with a high school diploma. The variance, or range, of earnings within education groups is larger than the difference in average earnings between different levels of educational attainment. In other words, the highest incomes among high school graduates can be larger than the lowest among post-secondary graduates.

University is not a golden ticket. It is a risky endeavour and is not the best choice for everyone. Indeed, the very fact that some people easily repay their loans, while others are crippled by the same level of debt, suggests that university does not pay off financially for everyone. The riskiest part of deciding to go to university, in terms of financial cost, is whether one’s future earnings will be large enough to compensate for the earnings and work experience that are forgone while in school. Every dollar that is used to eliminate tuition could be used instead to develop insurance against such earnings losses.

Truly addressing inequality of opportunity that transmits across generations requires more fundamental changes to our educational system. Eliminating tuition will not get the job done, and is not the best way to invest public funds in education if the goal is to reduce inequality. There are so many other ways in which public funds could be used to greater effect.

At the top of my list, I would put redressing the resource gap between First Nations on-reserve and provincially funded K–12 schools. This means not just equalizing ongoing funding levels but also making up for years of inadequate capital investment. More generally, the issue of inequality in high school resources does not get enough attention in Canada, leaving so many important questions unanswered. For example, in how many and in which high schools in Canada is calculus only offered via correspondence courses Mitigating these and other inequalities that occur at the elementary and secondary level will be more cost-effective and the benefits will be more broadly distributed.

Why not do both Why not simultaneously make equity-enhancing investments in elementary and secondary schools, and make university free Although I do not believe that the benefits of eliminating tuition outweigh the costs, there is a far more important reason not to make tuition free in the current policy environment. The barriers that occur during elementary and secondary school—the brick wall—would prevent many disadvantaged youth from taking advantage of free tuition. As long as inequality of opportunity exists at educational stages that precede university in a child’s life, eliminating tuition will disproportionately benefit those who have also experienced more opportunity in elementary and secondary school.

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