Carleton’s administration and CultureWorks responded to concerns raised about their agreement by insisting CultureWorks does not represent the privatization of public education at Carleton.
CultureWorks is a private ESL school offering non-credit language training to international students who meet academic admission requirements but lack language proficiency.
Carleton provost and vice-president (academic) Peter Ricketts and CultureWorks president Tina Bax addressed allegations made by the Carleton University Academic Staff Association (CUASA).
CUASA criticized the university’s administration for contracting private company CultureWorks to provide English as a Second Language (ESL) training and international student recruitment, instead of having Carleton provide the services themselves.
“There is really no reason for Carleton to provide a service that is not central to our academic mission,” Ricketts said. “Our academic mission is to provide programs and courses for academic credit that lead to the offering of degrees, diplomas, and certificates. We do not do pre-admission training.”
These students are given conditional acceptance and begin their degree program after graduating from CultureWorks.
The organization will operate on campus and begin recruiting international students in January 2013.
Bax called her organization a “pathway for students to enter university” and said the program is not privatizing education.
“This is language training,” she said. “We’re not teaching university credit courses. We’re not replacing faculty jobs. We’re not looking to do anything the university already does.”
Last year, while considering a deal with international recruiting and language-learning company Navitas, the administration created an internal working group. The working group found the deal was not in Carleton’s best interests, and based on that recommendation, the administration scrapped the deal.
The CultureWorks deal was signed by the administration without a similar review process.
Ricketts has said in the past that this was because the deals are different: Navitas was for-credit and its students entered directly into second year, whereas CultureWorks is non-credit and pre-admission.
CUASA said putting Carleton’s international reputation in third-party hands is risky because, as CultureWorks is a private company, the university’s Senate lacks academic oversight over the program.
“For-profit education partnerships traditionally pressure instructors to pass their students regardless of their level of achievement, providing no guarantee that their students will be properly prepared to do well at Carleton other than that provided by the company,” CUASA’s website stated.
Ricketts said the university exercises academic oversight over the CultureWorks program by accepting only students who meet the required language scores of the Canadian Academic English Language Assessment (CAEL).
“The CAEL score that will be required of students graduating from CultureWorks will be the same CAEL score we require from any other international student wanting admission into Carleton,” he said.
CUASA councillor Patrizia Gentile earlier raised the concern of campus space going to the organization, and whether that space could be better used for Carleton students.
Ricketts says CultureWorks will rent office space in the CTTC building, which he says was built for incoming organizations, and classroom space and time will be organized around Carleton’s academic programming.
“CultureWorks is being very flexible about where we slot them so that they don’t interfere with any of the regular teaching allocations,” he said.
Bax said CultureWorks does not interfere with student services at Carleton either, employing internal staff for housing, medical, and application services, and remitting fees to Carleton for services its students use, like transportation, internet, and the fitness centre.
CUASA argued that, because non-credit ESL training was previously provided by the school through the Centre for Intensive Language Education (CILE), which closed four years ago and employed 19 CUASA members, Carleton has outsourced the department.
“CILE proved that it could provide high-quality internal ESL instruction, but the University was more concerned with the financial bottom-line than with protecting its workers,” the CUASA website stated..
CILE was losing a significant amount of money for the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Ricketts said, whereas CultureWorks provides an accredited ESL pathway without the high cost of starting and operating the program internally.
He said the program does not threaten faculty jobs.
“CultureWorks will provide an additional supply of international students into Carleton, some of whom may need to have continuing ESL study,” he said. “This is providing additional students that may need to take those courses, so it’s actually helping protect jobs, and might even add jobs as well.”
