Section Three
Costs and Use of Resources

Overview
Cost questions can be examined within a framework of values about learning. This section begins by exploring some of the values underlying funding decisions, especially for adult education and training. Costs involved in new learning technologies such as monetary investments and human resources are considered at the levels of national infrastructure, educational provider, the community and the individual.

What this section does not provide is a complete cost picture of new learning technologies. Even if it were possible to develop such a picture, given all the variables and unknowns, it is beyond the scope of this paper to do so. Instead, by presenting some of the types of costs, it becomes easier to uncover the underlying values behind financial decisions and their implications for women's learning.

Values and Costs
A suggested way of approaching cost issues is to convert them into questions about comparative values. We can think about what else a certain amount of money could buy or compare costs with alternatives that achieve the same or similar outcomes. For example, when we read that the local school board has invested $500,000 in providing computers for school administrators, we might ask how that compares with the salary of three special education teachers just declared redundant.

In another example, Heather Menzies, in Whose Brave New World, notes that one year's investment in information technology by the federal government would pay an annual salary of $40,000 to 90,000 people.¹ This approach is in contrast to that of accounting which sets up different categories for costs for equipment (usually capital costs) and costs for people (usually operating costs), an arrangement that does not readily allow for comparisons based on values.

Who Pays for Education and Training in Canada?
It has been generally accepted in Canada that the cost of educating "the young" (usually defined as those pursuing elementary and secondary education with their age cohort) should be a public expense shared by all taxpayers, rather the individual financial responsibility of families. The levels of education that are publicly funded have gradually increased along with expectations of what is considered an adequate education, from grade school completion in the 1940s to high school completion in the 1960s. In the mid 1960s to mid 1970s, college and university education was made more affordable through a system of grants and loans. At the same time there was a rapid expansion of the post secondary system across Canada; the number of universities virtually doubled between the 1950s and 1980s and a large portion of the community college system was established.

Public funding for the expansion of the post secondary system has apparently reached its limits. Federal grants have been curtailed over the past decade, making less money available both for maintaining the institutional system and for providing financial support for individual students.