Successive generations of university presidents, who typically have a lot more letters after their names than the average politician, have managed to protect their sector from the kind of government scrutiny that has been applied to every other publicly-funded service. No government has had the nerve to give the universities a blunt message, which boils down to “It’s about jobs.”
It’s about time, too. Ontario has a significant misfit between people’s skills and the jobs available. There are 160,000 jobs in the province that have been vacant for three months or more. Employers have a hard time finding skilled workers and it’s really up to college and universities, working with government, to close that gap.
Ontario’s new funding plan will certainly focus universities’ attention on that goal.
No comments:
Post a Comment