Guest Post By Amy Kaler (Sociology): Why Lukaszuk’s Budget Cuts Matter for Women

By now, almost everyone in Alberta knows that higher education in this province is under the gun. In March, despite vocal opposition from Albertans, Minister for Education and Advanced Enterprise Thomas Lukaszuk announced a cut of $147 million to the provincial budget for postsecondary education, knocking out years of progress in our universities and colleges. What many may not realize, however, is that women will be the main victims of Lukaszuk’s slashing. Here’s how it works.

Alberta has Canada’s biggest wage gap between men and women. In terms of hourly wages, men in Alberta earn an astonishing $6.04 per hour more than women (compared with a national gap of $3.57, and a gap of only $3.73 next door in Saskatchewan). [1] This gap is the result of Alberta’s economic tilt towards oil and gas extraction, which yields thousands of high-paying jobs at all skill levels, in occupations dominated by men. In Edmonton alone, the “trades, transport and equipment operations” sector – Statistics Canada’s term for all the jobs that service oil and gas extraction – is 93% male. [2] This one sector accounts for one third of all male workers, but only 3% of female workers. [3]

One of the few forces which offset the gender-skew of the oil and gas economy is postsecondary education. In Alberta, as elsewhere in Canada, the returns to higher education are higher for women than for men, when measured in annual earnings. Across Canada, women with no education beyond high school earn only 67 cents for every dollar their similarly-uneducated male peers earn. [4] When women have a bachelor’s degree, diploma or certificate, however, they earn 89 cents for every dollar a man with a similar education earns; and when women get master’s or doctoral-level degrees, their earnings rise to 96 cents on the male dollar. [5] Education thus is a powerful driver of women’s equality, and nowhere is it more important than in Alberta, where it partially counterbalances the powerful advantage that the resource economy gives to men.

And so, when higher education gets the axe, the financial implications for women are worse than for men. The economic hit to Alberta’s women is made even painful by the specific program cuts which have been announced by colleges and universities. With few exceptions, the programmes bearing the brunt of the budget cuts are ones in which the majority of students are female. The University of Calgary has cut 200 spaces in its arts programs. Red Deer College has eliminated its programmes in early learning and child care, hospitality and tourism, and virtual assistance (a form of home-based administrative support). Mount Royal University has suspended diplomas in performance, theatre arts and disability studies, as well as certificates in aging studies and neonatal nursing. Medicine Hat College has stopped the intake to its nursing program. Lethbridge College has halted its marketing and design programme, as well as its office administration offerings. Lakeland College will no longer admit students to study nursing, emergency services, office administration of events management. And the list goes on, with new hits on the programmes that have supported working women being announced every day.

Some may argue that the programmes which are being eliminated don’t lead to the big-money resource economy jobs that have come to characterize the Albertan dream. Why be a nurse, or an early childhood educator, or a musician, when you could scramble for the spots that train you to become a petroleum technician, an energy geologist, or whatever the industry dictates is needed this year? In an ideal world, perhaps these opportunities would be distributed equally between men and women. But in the real world, for many good reasons, women have sought to better their lives not only through “nontraditional” resource economy jobs but also through improving their education in the fields which have historically been most hospitable to women. When the doors to these fields slam shut, women will be left in the cold, and their economic disadvantage will increase.

Alberta politics is often not dissimilar from what happens south of the border. In 2012, American voters saw a flurry of policy statements and proposals which would have severely disadvantaged women relative to men, from interference with women’s health care to attacks on equal pay. What the political pundits dubbed the “war on women” was ended with a decisive loss for the hapless Republican candidates who put forward these ideas, thanks in large part to voters who insisted that women’s equality was not a political football (or hockey puck, to Canadianize the metaphor a bit).

We can do the same in Alberta. We can identify the education cuts for what they are – attacks which will intensify the already extreme disparity between the genders in Alberta. We can defend postsecondary education as a means to bring about greater social equality and economic security for both men and women. And we can remember what kind of province we want when the next election rolls around.

Amy Kaler, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Alberta

Lise Gotell, Chair, Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, University of Alberta

Sara Dorow, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Alberta

Stephanie Hayman, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Alberta


[1] Statistics Canada, “Labour Force Survey Estimates 2012.”

[2] Statistics Canada, “2011 Census.”

[3] Ibid.

[4] Statistics Canada, “Women and Education 2009.”

[5] Ibid.  

Posted in alberta funding for post-secondary education | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

News from Elsewhere: Robert Meister, President of Council of University of California Faculty Associations, Writes Open Letter to Coursera’s Daphne Koller

The President of the Council of University of California Faculty Associations, Robert Meister, has written an open letter to Coursera’s Daphne Koller (Stanford University) proposing to Coursera a course on the “for-profit model” it is pursuing. The letter captures better than any piece on MOOCs I have yet seen the essential contradiction in the altruistic claims purportedly driving MOOC-development and the various monetizing manoeuvres in which MOOC developers are engaging. Meister’s letter also involves a crucial, succinct defence of public universities. An excerpt:

“A large part of Coursera’s appeal lies in your own nearly-socialist vision of an informational Common to which access should no longer be restricted based on the scarcity of places at existing universities and colleges. . . . Here I agree with your and Coursera’s business logic’s implicit criticism of public higher education. Public education has all but lost sight of its egalitarian mission while raising its prices at three times the rate of inflation.

I disagree, however, with Coursera’s implicit claim that privately-financed MOOCs can fulfill the promise once made, and now abandoned, by public systems to be an engine for reducing social and economic hierarchy . . . .

The question is not whether we who teach in public higher education can or should resist the creation of a truly “free” informational Common, but whether we can keep education as a necessary knowledge commons public in innovative, egalitarian ways that run counter to what you and your rivals are planning and doing. . . What I do advocate is government investment in, and protection of, a system of providing common knowledge for the greater good of all in the way that public university systems once hoped to do. . . . A true educational Commons would be a force for reducing academic hierarchy and income inequality.”

Full letter at: http://cucfa.org/news/2013_may10.php.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Day of Contradictions: More Bad News from Mount Royal University and University of Calgary

The first contradiction of the day rolled in early this morning, with the news from Mount Royal University that its Deans’ Council has released a message in which the Deans assert the academic merit of programs that they are unequivocally happy to have “suspended”:

Dear Colleagues,

Following Wednesday’s vote at General Faculties Council (GFC), we would like to clarify our position on the issue of program suspensions. While most of the members of Deans’ Council who sit on GFC, voted to recommend against the program suspensions, we did so based on — GFC being an academic body — the academic merits of the programs. The Deans would like to state our unequivocal support for the suspension of these programs for budgetary reasons. We fully support the budgetary process that was followed, and endorse the recommendation that came out of that process, to suspend the following programs:

· University Transfer- Engineering
· Theatre Arts Diploma
· Music Performance Diploma
· Disability Studies Diploma
· Forensic Studies Diploma
· Journalism Certificate
· Advanced Studies in Perinatal and Neonatal Nursing Certificate
· Studies in Aging Certificate

Deans’ Council would also like to confirm it has expressed this recommendation to the Board of Governors, along with its full support for the strategic approach of both vertical and horizontal cuts in meeting our budgetary challenge.

I’d like to believe this message was made up. The Deans at Mount Royal University have (it seems) taken one decision in the official jurisdiction of the school’s General Faculties Council, and another by way of “message,” and in the second forum they have declared their “full support” for cuts to their academic programs.

Here’s the second contradiction, this in news from the University of Calgary late this afternoon.

Calgary has announced that, in addition to other cuts, it will be turning 200 students away from its Faculty of Arts next Fall. To justify this decision, Provost & VP Academic Dru Marshall is reported to have declared that Arts enrolment at the University of Calgary is “at an all-time high, probably well above where it should be.”

Where it should be? Let’s get this straight: the very programs that are regularly being raked over the coals in both the provincial and national press as having no place in the Relevant University are in fact so popular at the University of Calgary that Calgary’s Provost wants to turn students away from them? If students don’t agree that the Arts are useless and refuse to study them, University Administrations will diminish their capacity to take them?

Can this really be what is happening in the province of Alberta?

We seem to find ourselves in a world in which no one knows what to value or how to defend even the meritorious.

Where are the University administrators prepared to stand up for the academic mission of Alberta’s universities and challenge their Boards to assist them with the fight of getting the Government to reverse the cuts?

Word is that 50 academic staff members are to lose their jobs at the University of Calgary. We can only hope of all today’s stupefying news this news will prove untrue.

Posted in alberta funding for post-secondary education | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

AUPE Launches Email Campaign In Defense of Alberta Postsecondary Education

How wonderful is this! The Alberta Union of Provincial Employees (AUPE) has launched an email campaign in defense of postsecondary education in Alberta.

Screen Shot 2013-05-13 at 3.40.21 PM

There have been a lot of distractions with the developments in postsecondary education since the Government’s budget speech of March 7th, but the simple fact remains: the Government’s cuts of $147 million to Alberta’s 26 postsecondary institutions are on a scale seen only twice before in Alberta’s history, and they make no sense for Canada’s richest province. They make especially little sense at a time in world history where an increasingly complex globe requires that as many of us as possible be thinking and researching our way towards solving local and global problems while equipping this generation of Albertans to play powerful, shaping roles in the twenty-first century. As the University’s Provost noted in an interview with University Affairs earlier in the week, other countries (Asian countries, especially) are making heavy investments in postsecondary education.

The Government of Alberta needs to invest in, not cut, postsecondary education in Alberta.

To participate in AUPE’s campaign, go to albertapostsecondary.com.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Arts Programs “Suspended” at Mount Royal University; In Related News, Minister Declares Gumball Redford “Great Art”

Screen Shot 2013-05-10 at 2.29.04 PM

Posted in alberta postsecondary education | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

“How Our Universities Can Compete” 2: Let’s Imagine

There has been other important news at the University of Alberta today — though there hasn’t been a peep or a Tweet about it from the University administration. In the latest world university rankings from QS, officially out today, two units at the University of Alberta have made it into the top 50 of universities worldwide in their fields. One of them is the Faculty of Pharmacy. The other is a department housed in the Faculty of Arts.

Let’s think about that, shall we?

In 2009-2010, the department in question was told, along with all other departments in the Faculty of Arts, that it had to cut its already very limited departmental operating budget by 50%. The department in question had no choice but to pull its phones from the wall.

The Faculty has been subject to extremely damaging cuts since, with the cuts last year leading to the loss of many support staff and the closing of faculty positions. Our bark has been “tempest-tost,” and the news today, though on the face of it good, shows us the dilemma: How can we, in the face of the Government’s devastating cuts to postsecondary education in its budget of March 7th, do anything other than dwindle, peak, and pine, and recede from the very accomplishments that make possible today’s news?

In the weekend’s Journal, Kathleen Lowrey (Anthropology) asked Albertans to understand the game of “let’s pretend” that the Government is playing with Albertans, as those who survive in various facets of the public sector struggle to continue doing, on Fumes, the work they were already doing on Not Enough, because they care about the people affected by their work. Let’s play a related game, the game of Let’s Imagine.

Imagine where this department might rank if it had not been subject to cuts but had been instead the beneficiary, along with other departments in Arts, of investment.

Imagine what its faculty members would be achieving, along with other faculty members in Arts, if the Government valued the Arts in such a way as to nurture us.

What work might we be doing for the public good that we cannot now do because we lack, in so many forms, the necessary support?

We lack support staff, lost in the reorganization last year.

We lack research time, for which the Faculty stopped offering internal support a few years ago.

We lack the time to bring the innovations in our research to bear as fully as we want to upon our teaching as time pressures produced by other lacks converge.

And we lack colleagues to teach alongside us and join us in the research through which the dynamic potential of this Faculty might know no end. (Our colleagues are retiring without being replaced.)

This logic applies, of course, across the entire institution. Where might all units at the University of Alberta be with the appropriate investment?

Just a couple of years ago, the University claimed that it wanted to be amongst the “Top 20″ in the world by 2020. As I have noted repeatedly, if you look closely at the rankings of the universities that are actually in the Top 20 more often than not their Faculties of Arts outrank the institutions as a whole. And so today’s news is distinctly bittersweet. It confirms that the Faculty of Arts has the potential to help the University as a whole achieve the ambition that the Government’s cuts compel the University to abandon. For at the very moment in which Canada should be investing in its postsecondary institutions, as Provost Carl Amrhein says in this morning’s University Affairs, what is the Government of Alberta doing? It’s pulling the lifecord that sustains us out of the wall.

There is another irony to today’s news. On Monday Albertans received confirmation that the Government is directing funding away from postsecondary institutions, to the tune of $147 million, so that it can fund an institute for research that it can “commercialize.” The Journal reported that the cost of funding that institute in its first year will be about $160 million. The rerouting of funds is thus obvious, no matter what claims the Government may make about where the $160 million strictly speaking comes from. One hundred and forty-seven million dollars is being directed away from institutions that would usually determine, through internal processes, how public funds for postsecondary education and academic research are to be spent, and directed to an institute whose research mandate will be dictated, as the Minister of Enterprise and Advanced Education has declared, “by the Market.” (See earlier post on that issue here.)

Let’s be clear: the direction of funds away from individual institutions to an institute for commercializing research is a direction of funds away from those units within Alberta’s postsecondary institutions that do non-commercializable research. Pharmacy will do well under the Government’s new scheme, for as the Minister of Enterprise and Advanced Education has made clear the Government’s plans for that institute centrally involve US Big Pharma. The Government’s choice will have its greatest negative implications for the other Faculty that today scored so well in the QS world university rankings. 

And the implications of this redirection of funds are already been felt, with great pain, at other Faculties of Arts across the province. Mount Royal University will be holding a wake for its many closing programs on May 17th. Most of those programs are in Arts.

Screen Shot 2013-05-08 at 3.04.28 PMToday’s news may be about one department in only one of the province’s Faculties of Arts, but it should give us all some sense of what this Government, with its devastation of public goods in its budget of March 7th, is doing to the province as a whole: undermining our promise, and taking away what might have been. How do universities compete internationally? By being given the funds necessary to do their work to the best of their ability. If only the Government would stop playing its game of “Let’s Pretend,” and play that other, far superior game of “Let’s Imagine.” Let’s imagine what Alberta’s postsecondary institutions might be — and might have been — with the appropriate Government investment. You can hold a wake for what is being killed off. But how do you mourn what does not exist and never will because a Government hasn’t had or does not have the foresight, courage, and imagination to bring it into being?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | 6 Comments

“How Our Universities Can Compete” (University Affairs) in which the Provost Says Several Necessary Things

Today’s University Affairs includes a short interview with the University of Alberta’s Provost Carl Amrhein in which the Provost notes the following:

On “Skills”

If you define skilled people as those who, through a combination of experience and training and education, make a useful contribution to the economy and society, then everybody who leaves a university is a skilled person. If you look at all of the graduates from all of the accredited programs – medicine, nursing, pharmacy, engineering, teaching, law, business – these are all exceptionally highly skilled individuals who walk into jobs and walk into labour markets that do not have enough employees.

On the Value of A University Education

I think the utilitarian attitude that whatever I do I have to convert into some useful, productive, paying activity is an attitude I don’t fully understand. … It’s not the kind of view of the value of education that was presented to me by my parents. I still believe that education is intrinsically in and of itself a good thing. If you want to monetize it, the statistics on lifetime earnings are overwhelmingly in favour of more education. So the critics of the value of an education are ignoring powerful statistical evidence. And they also are ignoring the reality of career tracks where you will change jobs many times and you need that set of skills and coping strategies to adjust to rapidly changing employment settings. I think the debate is misinformed.

On Canada’s Underfunding of Postsecondary Education and Academic Research

I believe that the universities are inextricably tied to the success of the nation, not just financially but culturally and in terms of government. I think it is an important and worrisome reality today that Canada is backing away to a certain extent from investing in higher education at the very moment other powerful systems are investing heavily.

Full article at http://www.universityaffairs.ca/how-our-universities-can-compete-in-the-world.aspx.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a comment