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The Impact of Privatization on Newfoundland College Students: The Case of the Career Academy

 

Michelle McBride and Gregory Kealey

Memorial University of Newfoundland

Post-secondary education and training in Newfoundland is largely a post-World War II phenomenon, and in fiscal terms really a post-Confederation matter. From 1949 to the early 1970s federal financing allowed the provincial government to create a public post-secondary education system without paying all of the costs. With federal cuts to transfer payments and the neo-liberal debt and deficit reduction strategy, from the late 1970s to the present Newfoundland was left with a public system it could ill afford. As the public system endured constant reorganization and continuous fiscal cutbacks, private colleges stepped in to fill the training void, especially in the 1990s.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, many private training schools began as secretarial or business training schools to provide practical job training skills, primarily to women. They were well positioned to take advantage of the province’s desire to create a more flexible and productive workforce, familiar with new technologies -- including electronics, computers, and telecommunications. The province’s unwillingness to pay for upgrades to the public college system opened the space for the expansion of private colleges.

Three Canada-wide factors (the federal government’s privatization push, the need to upgrade and retrain workers, and the neo-liberal definitions of training as an individual responsibility) combined with a set of circumstances peculiar to Newfoundland to give an added boost to private training in the early 1990s . Newfoundland’s high rate of private college enrolment can be attributed in part to the massive influx of training funds from The Atlantic Groundfish Strategy (TAGS) program.

TAGS was introduced by the federal government in the early 1990s after the collapse of the cod fishery. Its main goal was to reduce the labour force in the fishery by half through retraining, relocation, income support, and retirement. While designed primarily as an income support program, TAGS also included an education and retraining component to provide opportunities outside the fishery. TAGS training funds allowed many private colleges to make the switch to more high tech and information technology courses.

Private institutions appealed to students for several reasons. They offered shorter and more focused programs than their public counterparts; waiting lists for courses at public colleges were longer; and private colleges in many cases were more willing to take students without the educational achievement level demanded by the public college system. There were geographic and psychological barriers preventing many students from attending public colleges. Many students did not see either Memorial University or the public college system as attainable goals, either because few people from their areas had ever attended public higher education or because they did not feel their educational achievement would allow them entrance.

Between 1989 and 1996 enrolments at private colleges increased by more than 500 per cent as the student body reached 13,000 students at 57 institutions. By 1997 students at private training institutions made up almost 50 per cent of all college students. After passing a Private Training Act in 1988, however, the government did little to regulate private training institutions until serious problems emerged in the late 1990s, paramount among them the lack of standards for private colleges and the 1998 bankruptcy of the Career Academy.

From the outset problems existed with private, for-profit training colleges. The 1986 provincial Royal Commission of Employment and Unemployment criticized the lack of a standardized curriculum and the duplication of programs already available in the public system. It recommended that no public funding be given to those institution offering courses already available through the public system and that the Department of Education take a more active role in the regulation of private training institutions. The high cost of tuition and the questionable employment benefits were also raised as problematic. A recent study shows that graduates from public colleges had higher levels of employment, higher wages, and greater degrees of satisfaction with their programs.

As the first of private school bankruptcies occurred in 1988, questions began to arise over the financial stability of private colleges. Most dramatically, Newfoundland’s largest private vocational school, the Career Academy, shut its 14 campuses in Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and Ontario in 1998. It was Newfoundland’s largest private college that, at its peak in 1997-98, enrolled 35 per cent (3600 students) of all private school students in Newfoundland.

A number of complaints had been registered against the Academy prior to its closure, including failure to provide appropriate instruction for registered occupations and substandard equipment. Along with 240 staff members, more than 1400 students were affected by the bankruptcy. Not all were able to transfer to other colleges. Students’ ability to reclaim tuition costs has been limited by legal constraints. Meanwhile, some bear continued responsibility for student loans meant to cover tuition for Academy programs.

In its early years, Newfoundland’s private, for-profit training industry filled a significant gap in training for women, and for many who were excluded from post-secondary institutions by educational achievement or geographic remoteness. Initial government enthusiasm and its failure to regulate the industry led to the crises of the late 1990s, symbolized by the collapse of the Career Academy. Despite the withdrawal of most federal training support, the outcomes data for private institutions, and the collapse of public confidence in private colleges, Newfoundland still awaits legislative action on an appropriate regulatory regime.