A Critique of the Instrumentalization of Post-Secondary Education
On Building Skills for Jobs and Other Neoliberal Fairy-Tales
Led by the United Conservative Party, the Alberta government recently released the Alberta 2030: Building Skills for Jobs strategy, which is self-described as a “reimagined vision for post-secondary education in [the] province.” The strategy notes its debt to the findings of the 2019 MacKinnon Report (a.k.a., the Blue Ribbon Panel on Alberta’s Finances), which concludes that Alberta overfunds post-secondary institutions — tellingly lumped together here under one rubric — in comparison to similar provinces like Ontario, British Columbia, and Quebec. And, to adapt to government spending cuts, the report recommends that they should “…be encouraged to expand revenues from sources other than provincial grants.”
This kind of corporate logic, as well as the language of deregulation, are key threads that run through the MacKinnon Report. Passages like the following, for instance, are certainly not few-and-far-between:
“[a]s costs increase and limits on government grants are inevitable, government needs to untie the hands of post-secondary institutions, encourage them to be more entrepreneurial and innovative, and allow them to implement responsible adjustments to tuition fees.”
