After last month鈥檚 provincial election, we promised a series of editorials on the major issues facing the new government. Last Sunday we looked at health care. Today鈥檚 topic is education.
While policy dilemmas are sometimes difficult to grapple with, the main problem in education is simple 鈥� hard numbers. Over the last decade-and-a-half, enrolment in our public school system has fallen every year, from 678,000 pupils in 1998 to just 614,000 today.
In sharp contrast, college and university enrolments have exploded. In 2001, 360,000 students attended a post-secondary institution in sa国际传媒 Today, the total is close to half a million.
It鈥檚 hard to say which reality has proved more difficult to manage 鈥� gratifying expansion, or demoralizing contraction. Both have placed huge strains on staff members, administrators and students.
The impact on our K-12 system is well illustrated by what鈥檚 happening in the Cowichan Valley School District. Classroom places were originally built for 11,000 students, yet there remain only 7,600 to fill them. The decline is part of a nationwide boom-and-bust cycle in birth rates.
Six schools are to be closed, an annual $200 school-bus fee will be introduced and staff will be laid off.
For a small district, these measures are enormously disruptive. Yet in varying degrees, they are being replicated across the province.
The opposite experience has gripped post-secondary education. Rising demands for a more highly skilled workforce have caused a 30 per cent surge in college and university attendance. The number of trade apprentices has doubled.
In response, the provincial government has credentialled seven new university campuses since 2001 and additional staff are being taken on.
Yet supply has not kept up with demand. Class sizes are becoming unwieldy, written classwork is being replaced with multiple-choice exams and far too many courses are taught by assistants or graduate students rather than faculty.
In short, here too the quality of education has suffered.
This is one of the grittier policy dilemmas confronting Premier Christy Clark and her colleagues. Financially speaking, the logical course would be to continue grinding the K-12 program while its workload declines, and nourish post-secondary institutions with the money saved.
Yet logic must be tempered with on-the-ground realism. Starving the public school system can be carried too far. The events in Cowichan go beyond reasonable economies to the borders of destruction. Among teachers, and in the community, morale takes a terrible pounding.
Moreover, the decline in birth rates is expected to bottom out next year. By 2024, the number of school-age children will have recovered to pre-1998 levels.
That is admittedly a provincewide forecast. Some communities, the Cowichan Valley perhaps among them, may see a slower growth rate.
However, the case for more privation is increasingly difficult to make. It is time for a new direction here.
On the postsecondary side of the ledger, the sa国际传媒 Liberals never did match growing enrolments with equal funding. Since 2001, government grants have declined 13 per cent on a per-student basis, and universities have been told to find the shortfall internally.
There is some justification for this. The cost of a degree doubled over the last decade, as universities took advantage of growing demand to ratchet up their fees.
Student-debt totals have reached alarming heights. And far too many faculty members ignore their teaching duties to chase lucrative off-campus contracts. Our kids are not getting value for money.
Yet sa国际传媒 has some of the best universities in sa国际传媒. They are a priceless provincial asset.
Here, too, some new thinking is required. The economy drive has run its course. It is time to pursue a strategy of growth, rather than containment.
