Alberta has released its budget for 2024. I think. It’s actually a little hard to tell because they don’t actually list what they’ve done as a budget, but rather as “estimates”. I’m not sure what they’re trying to accomplish by this wording, perhaps it allows them to try to deny responsibility. “Oh, we didn’t actually budget for that, that’s just an estimate of what we’ll spend, it’s not our fault.”
In it, they note that “In 2022-23, own source revenue of Alberta PSIs averaged 53 per cent of PSI operating expense;” Or, in other words, there is no longer public post-secondary in Alberta; it’s primarily privately funded in Alberta. They go on to proudly announce “by 2026-2027 this share is projected to increase to 58 per cent, reducing the share funded by government to 42 per cent.” Of course, the only way this happens in a system where tutors and faculty and staff need raises to try to keep up with inflation is with significant increases in tuition, or significant decreases in either support (as staff dollars have to be redirected toward making money) or non-capital infrastructure. And for AU, that’s especially damaging, because almost all AU’s infrastructure is non-capital.
To counter this, you can expect that they will announce a significant increase to the amount to be spent on student aid, but when you look at the estimates, it’s interesting to note that they have, for some reason, lumped private career colleges and student aid into the same category. This is obviously not a very natural pairing, which leads to the assumption that they’ve done this to try to hide something, and somehow, I don’t expect that thing is a massive increase to student aid.
What’s frustrating about this is elsewhere, Premiere Danielle Smith has announced a need for Alberta to diversify its economy, and the proven best way to do that is to get as many different individuals a broad-based educational experience, such as post-secondary can provide. Moving toward higher tuitions and lower public funding for post-secondary is exactly the opposite of that.
In other news, the campaign period for the AUSU Council election has started. As usual, I’ll be presenting the candidates with a set of questions to try to find out a little about who they are and what they think about the issues facing AUSU members, and hope to have that up for you next week just before the election starts.
Meanwhile, this week, we start off with a brand-new Minds We Meet interviewing a student pursuing the Human Resources degree from AU. Also, though Black History Month ended yesterday, we have the third in the series of transformational Black figures, and to round things out, [blue rare] explores how the things that don’t work are what works about us.
And of course, we also have scholarships, events, news, thoughtful explorations, inspirational material and more!
So rather than thinking about the “estimates”, enjoy the read!
