Greetings!
Today's post contains a link to Part 2 of a talk that I gave at Georgian College last December. Part 1 dealt with the history of Ontario community colleges, and changes to levels of government funding.
Part 2 of the talk looks at how government austerity and underfunding of college education has led to increased burdens on both students and faculty. For students, rising tuitions have led to unsustainable debt-loads and an increasingly skewed balance between work and study . Many students work full time while also engaging in full time studies - a situation that leads to stress, health problems, and decreased academic performance.
For faculty, underfunding has led to layoffs of full time positions and to the proliferation of online courses as a management cost-cutting strategy. Without intellectual property protection, online course delivery becomes a way to increase class sizes, reduce faculty, deliver courses using part-time faculty, and reduce "program duplication".
Finally, despite austerity for college students and faculty, the number of full time college administrators is ballooning. Money is increasingly going to hire new managers, not to improve the quality of education.
Negotiations 2014 - Part 2
Thursday, March 20, 2014
Monday, March 17, 2014
Talking About Negotiations in 2014 - Austerity and Underfunding in Higher Education
Greetings!
Well, I didn't expect to be taking this long a break from posting to the Campaign for Quality Education blog. For the past two months I've been working on the Report on Education in Ontario Colleges, a document that sums up conversations with over 600 faculty at all 24 of Ontario's Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology. The Report will be launched shortly, and in subsequent weeks I'll be posting about the various questions it raises.
However, I'll first be sharing a talk on the issues facing college professors that was recorded at Georgian College this past December. OPSEU's talented videographer, Anna Jover, was present at the talk, and has done her best to make me sound somewhat coherent (no small feat!). Over the next few days the talk will be posted in four parts.
Part one of the talk deals with an important aspect of college education today - the climate of fiscal austerity and subsequent chronic underfunding of higher education. This is a story of tax cuts to corporations and the wealthiest individuals, and of federal and provincial governments' retreat from funding public services. This context is critical if we're to understand the challenges facing post-secondary today.
After posting the talk, I will be returning to the college meetings that occurred late in 2013, and checking in with the hard-working faculty at Fanshawe, Loyalist, Sault, Seneca, and Durham.
And now, part 1 of CAAT-A Bargaining 2014...
Negotiations 2014 - Part 1
Well, I didn't expect to be taking this long a break from posting to the Campaign for Quality Education blog. For the past two months I've been working on the Report on Education in Ontario Colleges, a document that sums up conversations with over 600 faculty at all 24 of Ontario's Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology. The Report will be launched shortly, and in subsequent weeks I'll be posting about the various questions it raises.
However, I'll first be sharing a talk on the issues facing college professors that was recorded at Georgian College this past December. OPSEU's talented videographer, Anna Jover, was present at the talk, and has done her best to make me sound somewhat coherent (no small feat!). Over the next few days the talk will be posted in four parts.
Part one of the talk deals with an important aspect of college education today - the climate of fiscal austerity and subsequent chronic underfunding of higher education. This is a story of tax cuts to corporations and the wealthiest individuals, and of federal and provincial governments' retreat from funding public services. This context is critical if we're to understand the challenges facing post-secondary today.
After posting the talk, I will be returning to the college meetings that occurred late in 2013, and checking in with the hard-working faculty at Fanshawe, Loyalist, Sault, Seneca, and Durham.
And now, part 1 of CAAT-A Bargaining 2014...
Negotiations 2014 - Part 1
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