Background: 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 1940's to high school completion in the 1960's.

The population surge of high school graduates in the mid 1960's to mid 1970's, the belief that all academically qualified applicants had a right to post secondary education and the confidence that further education was a ticket to employability increased the pressure to make college and university education affordable through a systems of grants and loans. At the same time there was an enormous investment in a rapid expansion of the post secondary system across Canada; the number of universities in Canada virtually doubled between the 1950's and 1980's, and a large proportion of the community college system was established.

For the time being, public funding for the expansion of the post secondary system has apparently reached its limits, as federal grants in support of post secondary education have been curtailed over the past decade, making less money available both for maintaining the institutional system and providing financial support for individual students in post secondary education.

The shifting pattern of funding adult education and training

In contrast to a general consensus that the cost of educating the young should be a public expense, there are a range of prevailing beliefs about who should pay for education and training of those who are beyond what is traditionally considered "school age". These programs include what is variously called adult education, continuing education, adult retraining, and adult upgrading. The numbers of people served in these programs are significant: according to Statistics Canada's Adult Education and Training Survey (AETS), about 35% of the Canadian adult population took courses or received training in 1993.²⁴

There does not seem to be a general consensus about how the costs of adult education and training should be balanced between society as a whole and the individual learner. To some extent, the response depends on how education is regarded- as a personal and economic benefit to the individual, as the right of every citizen, or as a common good for society as a whole.

Continuing education

Until recently, many post secondary institutions had a long-standing tradition that the costs of continuing education were shared between the provider and the learner, on the grounds that it was part of the institution's mission to serve the population whose taxes supported it. But this has changed dramatically over the past ten years, with increasing demands that continuing education programs not only recover direct costs, but also return a profit to the institution. Some continuing educators felt the move towards profit making was a betrayal of public educational institutions' social responsibility; others felt it was a realistic response to a changed funding climate.²⁵

In order to increase their revenues, post secondary institutions are increasingly seeking "partnerships" with the private sector, in a variety of arrangements ranging from those in which the institution provides programs customized to meet the training needs of a particular company or industry to those in which the institution obtains special rates for use of a particular corporation's product or service, such as computer software or long distance telephone access.

Adult education and training

There has also been a mix of approaches to funding in the field of retraining and adult upgrading. In the 1960's and 1970's, there was an increase in government funded retraining and upgrading as part of the rapid expansion of publicly supported community development initiatives. Since then, funding patterns have changed according to the political tenets of the day.

In place of "block funding" which enabled providers to allocate funding according to local priorities, funding has recently tended to be more and more directed into particular types of programs, depending on prevailing beliefs about the value of particular types of training. In some years, funding priorities seemed to stress the importance of basic literacy and numeracy: in others, they supported provision of training in advanced technology in order to meet the anticipated demands of an economic system based on "knowledge workers."

In some sectors, employers have covered or shared with employees the cost of job-related training: there have also been representations from employer groups arguing²⁶ that the public education system should provide graduates with the skills they need for the workplace.

Funding for new learning technologies

In continuing education, adult education and training, while basic funding has been reduced, there have been increasing emphasis and financial support for the use of new learning

technologies in these contexts. This is sometimes done without necessarily determining the advantages of using technology, and often without setting up any provision for comparison between programs using new learning technologies and those that do not.

Funding for new learning technologies tends to be targeted. What this means is that, in many cases, the first priority of funders is that educational providers use a specific technology; what programs are offered, and to whom, are less important funding factors than the technology to be used.