Anyways, in sum: the emerging Alberta 2030 recommendations are for the most part banalities. Not necessarily bad banalities – there are a lot of worthy ideas in there, just none which suggest any evidence of innovative thinking or actual learning from other jurisdictions. But there are two obvious flashpoints, neither of which seems very promising ground for the government to launch fights.
Alex Usher has just posted How’s the Alberta PSE Re-Think Going? (Part 2) which, surprise, follows How’s the Alberta PSE Re-Think Going? (Part 1). Part 1 deals with whether the McKinsey review of Post-Secondary Education is worth the $3.7 million the province is paying for it. (It is not!) Part 2 looks at the recommendations.
What Usher doesn’t talk much about is the “Building Skill for Jobs” aspect of the whole exercise. The assumption is that PSE is all about giving students skills so they can get jobs. I also suspect that the skills imagined by the government are mostly those needed by the energy industry, even though there might not be the jobs in the future. As Usher puts it, “most UCP policy is a nostalgia play for the resource boom of 2004-2014”.
The two flashpoints Usher mentions are 1) a recommendation around deregulating tuition and then balancing that with needs-based financial aid. 2) The second is a recommendation to have fewer boards. Instead of a board for institution, there could be just one board for the research university sector.
We shall see.