In the 2012 Alberta provincial election campaign, the
Progressive Conservative party expressed strong support for post-secondary
education. Announcing
a $650 million promise for infrastructure funding, Premier Redford said "There's no doubt that post-secondary
institutions in this province, no matter where they are, are the key to our
future success.” Post-secondary
institutions were expecting stable three year cycles of funding in provincial
budgets, and were also expecting a 2% increase in funding in the March 2013
budget.
The March 2013
budget, however, did not fulfill these expectations. Instead, post-secondary funding was cut by
7.3%. Over the last few months, post-secondary
institutions across the province have been suspending some programs,
placing limits on student admissions, and making other difficult decisions in
order to deal with this change in provincial funding. Some
predict that the situation is going to get worse. For instance, not too many days ago the
Faculties of Arts and Science at the University of Alberta indicated that they
needed to achieve cuts that, when combined, totaled over $12 million, and
needed to do so by April, 2014.
The #abpse thread
in Twitter is an important source of information about this entire
situation. The figure below, taken today from a
Topsy feed that I created, indicates that over the past month there has
been an average of over 230 tweets per day that include the #abpse
hashtag. There is clearly a tremendous
amount of interest in this issue on Twitter.
The sharp rise in the middle of the figure corresponds to the
announcements from Arts and from Science at U of A later in August.
At times, the tone of these tweets
is angry and combative, expressing (I think) the fact that these cuts are
impacting individuals who are concerned about their livelihood, their program
of study, or their view about the quality of post-secondary education in this
province. Many different opinions are
expressed. There are disagreements about
how, and even whether, the cuts will affect students. There are debates about the necessity of the
cuts, as well as about how they should be implemented. There are appeals to the government and to opposition
parties about future policies and pleas to reverse the cuts. There are questions about the relationship
between enterprise and advanced education, as well as about the purpose of
universities and university degrees.
Students, explore Twitter’s
#abpse hashtag. Watch it, learn from
it, become involved with it.
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