Is the government devaluing education? (Article 3 of 3 in this series)
Or were others complicit too?
“Love your enemies, for they tell you your faults” - Benjamin Franklin
For better or worse I love being an educator, even when it does not love me back. I believe that it is incumbent on all of us to be objective, to be critical and to defend or reform this thing that we love. I stand by this notion even as stifling dissent has been normalized and groupthink across most educational institutions is all too familiar. I spoke with several post secondary educators from colleges and universities across the GTA, none of them wished to be named, quoted or otherwise identified. One even offered me advice as old as time; they thought I should really reconsider this piece and just go along to get along. But, if we are not honest with ourselves, with our colleagues and with our administrators then surely we will be at the mercy of the invisible levers of the market economy, and she is a cruel mistress.
In this last article of the series, I’m exploring the participatory role that educators and administrators may have played in possibly eroding public confidence. We should contemplate the fact that when Premier Ford made his announcements about skilled trades and then policing, there was no public defence of education, nor any social outrage at its devaluing. If education is a social good, generating social value, making the world a more informed place, where were community advocates protesting anti-intellectualism? All of that was conspicuously absent.
When Premier Ford introduced a new funding formula for Ontario Colleges tied to performance and labour market vectors, he put post-secondary institutions on a collision course with the harsh survivalism of the free market. As they tapped danced past declining domestic enrolment, and dealt with an unprecedented post pandemic dystopia, customer satisfaction and retention quickly became a higher priority. Prevailing attitudes turned students into customers. Students who were always stakeholders, were now being treated like shareholders.
Colleges and universities shored up their revenue shortfalls by boosting high value international assets. Those assets are international students whose tuition is not subsidized and is approximately three to four times higher than domestic fees. You just need to watch the Fifth Estate investigative story to see how that turned out. Albeit the piece while generally well done failed to highlight the government’s participatory role in promoting, profiting and encouraging the practices that the documentary seemed to lay squarely at the feet of all the colleges, as if they all operated in unison. The conditions and challenges faced by international students are outside the scope of this article, but for our purposes let’s recognize that history has repeatedly demonstrated the folly of treating humans like widgets in an economic process.
Let’s just focus on some basic economics here. Pricing broadly, and wage rates generally, are established by the laws of supply and demand. (Greater the demand, lower the supply, higher the price). Within the labour market the price of labour is based on the availability of the resource. The fewer skilled and educated workers available to fill the required position, the greater the demand, the higher the wage rate. Competition for jobs that did not require specialized education had generally been determined by factors such as reliable local transportation, access to affordable housing and a relatively level playing field among similar applicants. Jobs at one point were more appropriately linked to the credentials that employers demanded.
By the time we entered the twenty-first century there was significant scope creep in the original mandate for vocationally focused Ontario colleges. Many of the new programs and courses were neither vocationally driven nor particularly practical as originally envisioned. In fact college and universities were competing for students and it did not take long before the mission, purpose and offering at these two types of institutions began to merge, meld and sometimes become indistinguishable. Articulation agreements between colleges and universities became a fairly common practice, a two year college diploma could now get you into third year university, with some minor conditions. Four years later a person could boast having a college diploma and a university degree.
The economics of education changed the dynamics within educational institutions. Students, as consumers, demanded ease-of-use from their products. They clearly signalled expectations to receive the certificate they perceived they had already purchased, regardless of their performance. With vocal social media support, social justice activists began pedalling a new brand of constant campus marginalization, even parents seemed more invested in their children’s happiness than the mastery of the very subjects they were paying to learn. Through all of this, or perhaps because of it, teachers and professors quickly became impediments, hold-outs from a by-gone era.
To meet the demands of the labour market - a priority made clear by the government’s intended performance based funding model for post-secondary - institutions bent over backward to keep ‘bums in seats’ and supply the economy with qualified workers. The public became convinced that everyone was entitled to an education, and a credential. Employers naturally got on board, a bloated labour supply depresses the wage rate and reduces the need for perks and enticement. Education as a social good was increasingly seen as antiquated. Economic value was the benchmark, expansion of market share became a symbol of growth. Micro-credentials were brought to market so that just-in-time education was an option for those who could not commit to a diploma or degree. Those students would just become longer term prospects in the sales pipeline, give them a few months and someone would upsell them to a diploma option.
Faculty meetings at many institutions moved away from discussing teaching and learning, shifting towards sales and marketing. Subject matter experts on a variety of academic disciplines would marshal their creative energy towards planning call campaigns, fun recruitment activities, developing marketing events complete with swag and incentives for those impulse buyers. The most common academic content discussions remaining was about developing strategies to minimize course failures, ensuring assessments meet the students where they are at rather than where they ought to be academically, and contending with unprecedented student absences. One faculty member at a GTA college mentioned they routinely have less than 10% of their registered students show up to class regularly, yet feel pressured to ensure that everyone passes the course. Another part-time faculty member who has been teaching for the better part of the last decade, was adamant that offering criticism would be career suicide.
By focusing on the instrumental reason for obtaining a post-secondary credential rather than the social, emotional and intellectual value the journey offers its participants, post-secondary institutions shifted away from subject mastery, critical thinking and civic engagement. They shifted away from being a social good. They opted instead to focus on student satisfaction metrics to structure their business. Fear of litigation and human rights complaints now drive decision making. Fear of revenue shortfalls has informally yet pervasively led to an erosion of academic rigour, compromised in favour of bolstering retention. Utilizing a client-centric approach to students, combined with an unrelenting obsession with student satisfaction survey results, has arguably resulted in the diminishing marginal utility of a post-secondary education.
Employers hiring for unskilled jobs that did not require specialized education, now had a much larger pool to select from. With an abundance of college diplomas and university degrees in circulation, a predictable amount of credential inflation occurred. A job that once went to a high school graduate now required a college diploma, the job that once required a college diploma now required a university degree, and so on. To add another absurd twist, as people started to meet the new standard, a never ending cycle emerged; everyone embraced continuous learning with the net result being that the same groups of people were still only qualified for the same jobs as before, only this time they were all encumbered with student debt.
Since qualified labour was no longer a scarce resource, recruitment perks would no longer be necessary to entice workers to join a company. The writing would be on the wall for benefits, sick time, vacation time, permanent full time jobs, pensions and rewards for tenure. Welcome to the gig economy, where you get the freedom to work when you want, for as long as you want and wherever you want, because the old economic business model is now dead. You are a special entrepreneur, whose next gig is only a smart phone app away, only it comes at the cost of stability and security. Turns out we might have been better served by introducing an Economics 101 course in high school.
So, is the government devaluing education? Or, have we all played a participatory role? In my previous article I speculated whether the evidence supported the assertion that the government was playing fast and loose with the labour force of the future, or whether Premier Ford’s recent announcements were simply signals that it was time for a necessary market correction within post secondary. It appears the government’s focus on performance had the intended outcome on the culture within academia. In their earnest attempt to tear down the ivory towers, they may just have torn down more than a few of the load bearing walls in the process.
The commodification of education, rampant credential inflation, and a focus on student satisfaction over subject mastery may all have had a detrimental impact on public perception of value. The recent government announcements do seem to diminish the importance of post secondary education, yet post-secondary end users, the customers and their families aren’t outraged. Take away social and political commentary from those associated with academia, who is left standing with post-secondary defending the social good they produce?
Perhaps it is time to ask if it is just the government that is devaluing education, or have we all played a participatory role in knocking down the tent poles!
This is the third and last in a three article series exploring the interconnectedness of government labour policy initiatives and higher education.
Bio: Neil Gonsalves is an Indian-born Canadian immigrant who grew up in Dubai, U.A.E. and moved to Canada in 1995. He is an Ontario college professor, a TEDx speaker, a columnist, and an advocate for new immigrant integration.
