A panel hosted by Fulbright Canada Sept. 6 focused on the challenges facing Canadian post-secondary education as its landscape continues to change.
The panel was made up of Adam Radwanski, Ontario politics columnist at The Globe and Mail, Karen McBride, president and CEO of the Canadian Bureau for International Education, Brent Herbert-Copley, vice-president (research capacity) for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and Suzanne Corbeil, executive director of The Group of Canadian Research Universities (U15).
Fulbright Canada CEO Michael Hawes, a professor of international relations at Queen’s University, hosted and moderated the discussion.
Each panelist addressed a specific challenge relating to his or her field. Although the dialogue focused largely on broad challenges, such as interuniversity competition, the role of research capacity and the cuts to funding, the debates were largely framed with examples in the social sciences and humanities.
Radwanski addressed the political discourse on post-secondary education in Ontario and how the media frames the debate, focusing on quality versus accessibility of education, and its impact on Ontario politics in shaping the outcomes of the 2011 provincial election.
“If you talk to pollsters, they’ll tell you that the public is actually more concerned with access and affordability,” he said. “When push comes to shove, politicians tend to listen to pollsters. In our last [provincial] election in the fall of 2011, there was rarely a word said about the quality of education, and a greater emphasis on the affordability of it.”
Corbeil said that while the challenges of funding were significant, the role of university graduates in the economy is a persistent issue.
“Although the notion of students being unable to find a job is not a new theme, the overabundance of graduates in certain fields, such as teaching is a relatively new phenomenon that has renewed pressure on universities to graduate job-ready candidates,” Corbeil said.
“The reality is that universities are not nimble, making significant curriculum changes too slowly to keep up with changing economic demands.”
McBride raised the challenges of internationalization, and the growing importance of attracting foreign students to Canada.
“What we’ve seen is that the attitudes [toward international education] has evolved as both federal and provincial governments come to understand and recognize the critical importance of equipping the next generation of Canadian leaders with international knowledge, and skills to navigate different cultures and beliefs,” McBride said.
McBride argued that the valuation placed by the Canadian government relates specifically to economic gains, and does not do enough to give Canadians the full experience that that they deserve.
Herbert-Copley spoke primarily on the embracing of research and development in post-secondary education, but noted that newer professors are taking the liberal arts in a much broader direction.
“I think the younger generations are becoming more interdisciplinary in their outlook, and we’re seeing that in the approaches that newer faculty members are taking in their classes,” he said. “We found that 60-65 per cent of newer faculty members described their work as being quite or exclusively interdisciplinary.”
