Update from our Annual Report

Post-Secondary Education Task Force Report in PIA's 2010-2011 Annual Report

Click here for the Post-Secondary Education Task Force report in PDF

Click here to access our full annual reports

Plain text of the Post-Secondary Education Task Force Report:

Albertans recognize post-secondary education as a public good. No one doubts that it is the key to our future prosperity and to our development as a society. Most new jobs already require some form of post-secondary qualification, and Alberta’s chronic shortage of skilled labour and ‘highly qualified personnel’ has long been seen as a major barrier to the diversification of our economy. To ensure that we can equip our citizens to take up the opportunities offered by the developing global knowledge economy and help build our common future, we need to address access and affordability issues, lagging post-secondary participation and completion rates, as well as threats to the quality of the education our public universities, colleges and technical institutes are able to provide.

Alberta’s ability to meet these challenges is limited by the continuing freeze on provincial funding to post–secondary education. The freeze, mitigated only by some modest new expenditures to ease enrolment pressures, will trigger another round of debilitating cuts at our post-secondary institutions in the coming year. Without an increase in public investment across the system, we can expect to see reduced student intake, fewer programs and larger classes, more layoffs of academic and non-academic staff, increased reliance on casual hires and contracting out, more private-sector partnerships, and more user fees. Student debt will continue to balloon. At the same time, the growing emphasis on targeted research funding and the commercialization of publicly-supported research is putting new pressure on the teaching budgets of our post-secondary institutions.

The Alberta government is not unaware of the need to maintain its investment in PSE – what is needed is the political will to make this a priority, even in the face of calls for ever-deeper cutbacks in public spending. Building on its ‘Don’t Cut Us Out’ campaign, the PIA PSE Task Force has been working this year to develop strategies to challenge the assumptions behind the often-heard assertion that Alberta ‘just can’t afford’ to re-invest in post-secondary education unless and until the government’s fiscal position improves.

Our advocacy for increased spending on PSE needs to be seen as part of the larger debate going on in this province over the future direction of public expenditure and public services. The PSE Task Force is committed to making investment in post-secondary education a major theme of the second phase of the ‘Join Together Alberta’ campaign. At the same time, we will continue to seek ways to reinforce and broaden the scope of our advocacy by drawing connections with issues facing other public service sectors, such as healthcare and K-12 education.

Also available: Last year's (2009-2010) Task Force Report in PDF