Academic university programs and the intellectual skills gap in Canada

Abstract

In Canada as in many other developed countries, universities have reconfigured their degree offerings to focus on preparing students for jobs, yet employers are increasingly dissatisfied with the skills of university graduates. Employers deplore shortcomings in fundamental areas such as critical and creative thinking, analysis, and literacy. International studies confirm that competencies in these areas are declining. Neoliberal policies of recent decades instituted a tertiary education funding model under which costs are shared between the public and students, now seen as clients, and a regulatory model that opened the market to private colleges and universities. In parallel, university enrolments more than doubled even as secondary schools abandoned formal teaching of the literacy skills needed to prepare students for university study. This massification of tertiary education led to the dismantling of the academic programs that honed literacy and intellectual skills in favour of applied programs more suited to the lower literacy of the new cohorts. Given that the funding and admissions models of publicly supported universities now preclude the offer genuinely academic degrees, it will fall to the private sector to move beyond the creation of private applied colleges to support the establishment of independent universities dedicated to offering academic programs.