Jacqueline Perlin
Assistant News Editor
A new report is calling Canada’s post-secondary education system “highly dysfunctional”, criticizing it for its lack of cohesion, coordinated planning, and quality assurance system.
The Canadian Council on Learning (CCL) released their report October 11. Titled “What is the Future of Learning in Canada?”, the report criticized Canada and claimed it has failed to implement a national strategy to monitor services offered by universities.
“In the absence of [a national strategy on education], provincial priorities have diverged sharply,” says Alastair Woods of the York Federation of Students (YFS).
Because there are no national strategies set in place, he adds, there are different levels of affordability and access to education across the country, which creates an unequal system where some students have less access to college or university education.
Woods also points out that this is also evident at York. Being one of Canada’s largest post-secondary institutions, he says, creates many problems. However, if the government can create a national education strategy, things might begin to improve.
“We can start to reduce class sizes and hire more teachers so that we’re able to get the quality of education that students expect if they’re paying the highest tuition fees in the country,” says Woods, adding the cost of not investing in education translates into students not being given the necessary education to succeed in the economy.
Robert Drummond, associate professor of political science at York, also stresses that a lack of a national standard is one of several issues contributing to a reduction of education quality in post-secondary education.
“[There is a] higher dependence on tuition, less well-paid contract faculty, and ‘gypsy academics’ cobbling among different institutions,” says Drummond, noting this has led to a weakening of the educational experience for undergraduate students.
While the federal government is involved in post-secondary education to fund research, Drummond states the research is done only in areas the federal government deems as “important”.
“They’ve provided funding for research […] but they’ve directed all that funding research to […] science, engineering, and business and have not put as much as the research money into the humanities and social sciences as they once did,” says Drummond.
Drummond also notes there is strong resistance of both the province and post-secondary institutions against adopting a national standard, citing both a sense of provincialism—where the provinces are reluctant to have the federal government intervene in what they see as their responsibility—while universities themselves prefer to preserve a degree of autonomy, especially as a federal standard would impact factors such as institutional rankings.
“At the end of the day, the core issue is that there needs to be more government funding of both federal and provincial jurisdictions,” he says.
