The Moonspeaker:
Where Some Ideas Are Stranger Than Others...
Not a Winning Strategy (2025-09-08)
In preparation for this thoughtpiece, I went back to some of the bibliographies of books and papers accrued during my recent foray back into university to complete graduate studies in history. Immediately my vague impression about controversies over post-secondary education being new at least in the european-invaded americas was promptly debunked. Since such institutions are typically positioned as producers of a labour aristocracy, a professional managerial class, or just to train the offspring of the most successful gangsters, they are invariably fiercely fought over. Who will be allowed to attend, who will be allowed to teach, how they will be allowed to teach or learn, and what instructors will be allowed to teach all have associated clashes associated with them. Sometimes those clashes are literal and physical, with fighting in the streets or ruthless slaughter of faculty for political purposes. Other times the fighting is primarily via legislation and manipulation of degree-granting powers, who may be the president of the institution and so on. Post-secondary institutions differ in origin as well as focus, so we can find examples that began as religious seminaries, free publicly founded entities, and overdeveloped private and secular schools. In other words, they tend to have serious problems with conflicts of interest, even those originally founded as publicly owned and financed schools and colleges. After all, everybody wants to have a piece of presumably malleable young people, who often have no or at best weak commitment to the status quo. This makes them both promising and dangerous. Hence the constant attempts to create and impose the myth of the ivory tower, which doesn't convince anybody but is good for generating insults, and the way the treatment of their students is a genuine bellwether of social change.
I am in canada, and by chance have attended two universities founded in the early 1960s, plus some time at two others founded at the turn of the twentieth century. The experience at the older universities made me wonder why they were in the centres of the cities they are sited in, while the later two are as far from downtown in their cities as possible. They are far enough from downtown and served by the curiously constricted street systems so typical of suburbs that bad weather can force and effective campus closure because most students live off campus and literally can't get there. On trying to figure this out, I learned this was meant to make it as difficult as possible for university students to effectively protest. This is partly an immediate physical access issue, the students would have to round up transport to where they intend to protest unless the protest is right on campus. As the present insane real estate bubble reveals, the unaffordable campus residences, insufficient for the whole campus population anyway, makes university and college students milch cows for local real estate speculators. So today between ever-increasing tuition and ever-increasing rents, post-secondary students are often working multiple jobs and going to school, because unless they know people, landing a decent-paying job on a high school diploma alone is not feasible. Meanwhile, the current trend is for the MBA-poisoned set to demand post-secondary schools be reduced wholly to job training entities, for the jobs and industries the MBAs deem relevant. I doubt this strategy has ever worked out in the longterm, but it is in the nature of MBA training to fixate on short term gain and the devil catch the hindmost.
The provincial and federal governments constantly whittle away the public funds set aside for all education, let alone post-secondary institutions, but what particularly caught my eye in the articles about the most recent funding cuts is how the lobbyists who are supposed to be working for the latter are doubling down on a failed strategy. To make up for the loss of operating funding, and now at the point that raising tuition for domestic students is reducing their enrolment, universities especially have long focussed on increasing international student enrolment instead. It seems the university administrations are doing this on the assumption that such students will always come from wealthy families, and/or they will have major funding from their home countries. Their tuition is breathtakingly high, and even though officially this is not policy, if international students can stick it out, maintain a solid grade point average, and land a job in canada, this is a route to immigration as well. It's a hell of a gamble for them and difficult to stick the landing, so there is no question of the commitment and determination of international students. But the cruel fact is, they are being ruthlessly exploited, whether they are in "STEM" fields or the humanities, or the fine arts. Rather than pushing back against this perverse system of incentives, what has universities canada, the lobby group for many of the medium and all the large universities in canada say, through the president Gabriel Miller? "It's really costing canada the people we are gonna need to be doctors, to be engineers, to be entrepreneurs..." It is difficult to respond civilly to this statement. I'm going to do my best.
"Canada" should absolutely not be brain draining other countries. There are always people seeking to immigrate for positive reasons, and sadly too many people who must immigrate or become refugees outright. Those are facts, and it would be best of all for canada to stop supporting or pursuing policies that push people into leaving their homelands for the negative reasons. It is far from a loss to canada if international students come to canada for training they are unable to take closer to home, and then go back to take up jobs in those fields at home where they are needed. Indeed, I think that would be an important positive role for canada to take in the world instead. But what Miller is referring to is a practice of depressing wages of university-credentialed people in targeted fields to the point that international students are preferred because it is presumed they will be able to subsidize themselves somehow in those jobs. It is disingenuous to pretend canadian students don't want to enter STEM fields or medicine, when they do and even complete the programs, only to find they are unable to find longterm work. If they are fortunate and willing, they may end up landing a job overseas or at least south of the border in the united states.
Oh, I understand. I have heard and read the nonsense stories about canada's "falling birthrate" and how the population will be too small and old to be all those anticipated doctors, engineers, and entrepreneurs. This makes sense only in a country where ageism is so rampant in professional fields anyone older then fifty has problems keeping in appropriate work where they can help train understudies and pass on corporate memory. Ooops, this is exactly the rampant issue in canada, where I can tell you from direct experience managers are all about cutting experienced headcount because "we can all be replaced" and they think anyone who has higher wages besides them is deadweight and should be gotten rid of. When the organization subsequently goes into a tailspin, everyone is surprised and go figure, no one is to blame, except of course for the now through no fault of their own ill-experienced and ill-trained younger staff, who may work eighty hour weeks and still be accused of being lazy. Oh, you know what else is contributing to the perception of a reduced pool of possible hires? Racism! Yes indeedy, good old racism, especially anti-Indigenous racism, where Indigenous peoples living in what is currently called canada have both the highest birth rates and the fastest growing rates of post-secondary education, including university degrees. All those young people who are training up to go into trades, to go into medicine, STEM, and entrepreneurship. They are ready to work in far more than what is developing into an attempt to make Indigenous people into their own jailers by not-so subtle pressures to go into social work, paramilitary, and military jobs instead. Oh, and you know who else is having a hell of a time trying to get into other than shitpaid jobs that shouldn't be shitpaid in the first place? Women! Yes folks, sexism is playing its own special role by trashing women for having babies and if they don't, for if they enter the waged workforce or if they don't, and cutting off the nose of the economy and society at large to please an imagined racist, masculinist face. It would be funny if it wasn't so stupid and inevitably short-sighted. But of course it is short-sighted.
And I am not even getting into the insulting and ridiculously low pay typical of "service jobs" which universities and other post-secondary institutions play up and encourage in order to increase enrolment. "Service jobs" are emphatically not low-skilled or unskilled. I have close friends and relatives who have worked in a range of them, including the ever-present restaurant sector. Front of house or back of house, the hours are long, the work is hard on the body, and it demands an incredible amount of management of the people who come to the restaurants to eat. There are not as many as there used to be, even in places where the customer base is expected to be tourists or workers brought in for temporary large projects who have per diems. Those can be very difficult people to handle, all too often impatient and overtired, if not entitled and rude. By the way, it is a tell that teaching jobs are more and more often generally if not literally as poorly paid as service jobs requiring no formal training. Teaching students at every level, now including post-secondary, is quite explicitly referred to as a type of service. In elementary schools, to parents as babysitting. In secondary schools to parents as babysitting and exploitative employers as cheap job training. Now post-secondary institutions are being positioned as service providers to corporations, which, practically speaking, is a recipe for the ultimate destruction of post-secondary institutions. We are already seeing this, as the older and larger examples with control over if not outright ownership of real estate or with a proliferating collection of corporate funded professional schools and research centres make themselves more and more inhospitable to students and instructors alike.
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