The Dangers of Market-Driven Learning
By Paul Axelrod
The humanities, the social sciences and the fine arts — the core of liberal education — are at risk in Canadian universities, and the danger arises largely from the forced reorientation of higher education to assumed market needs.
Unless politicians, educators and business leaders rethink current trends, they will turn universities into little more than appendages of economic policy, and Canadian cultural life will be irreparably damaged.
Universities have endured lean years in the past, but for the first time since the 1950s, funding restraints have been accompanied by an apparent sea change in public policy. The doctrines of globalization, privatization, institutional competition, market-driven programming and user-pay fee schedules are now pushing at the gates of higher learning.
Consider the strategies already in place to shift the direction and reshape the funding allocation practices of Canadian universities. Between 1980 and 1998, operating revenues derived from tuition rose from 13 per cent to more than 30 per cent.
Research support from both federal and provincial agencies now favours mission and market-oriented studies over curiosity-driven scholarship designed to advance knowledge.
Ontario’s approach is especially crass. It has provided a number of targeted grants to universities, none of which include the humanities or social sciences. By contrast, it plans to double the number of students in computer science and engineering over the next three years.
Can policy-makers reliably anticipate the needs of the labour market? There are grounds for skepticism. Indeed, a June, 1998 Statistics Canada report claimed that the assumed massive shortage of computer scientists and systems analysts in Canada which is driving the Ontario enrolment-steering policy, is a myth.
Those committed to securing the health of liberal education must argue persuasively for the intrinsic and practical value of the liberal arts.
But we must also attempt to make university officials and politicians understand that higher education is neither capable of rescuing economies nor of accurately anticipating long-term labour force demands. If current trends continue, we will wake up early in the 21st century with universities shorn of cultural life, serving solely as deficient instruments of ever-changing economic policy.
This article appeared in the Toronto Daily Star, Nov. 30, 1998
Paul Axelrod is a professor of social science and history at York University