Accessibility Accountability

Adult learners and specifically we are talking about the baby boom generation, who are parents or single parents right now. Yet daycare, career counselling and other kinds of support resources are, at most educational institutions, only available on a daytime basis and therefore inaccessible to those on a part-time basis studying at night. So essentially we are talking about value for our money, ensuring that the educational resources are not only adequate but are attuned to the educational needs of the learners of this decade and ensuring that they are accessible in the fullest sense of the word.

I think you can establish some standards for accessibility. That is your way of achieving some national standards and essentially serving notice that you are going to hold the provinces and the post-secondary institutions accountable. It is not that difficult to do, once you make that commitment. The analogies to other minority groups, whether they are numerically a minority or merely a perceived minority in terms of experience, are very instructive. You have to deal with accessibility in its fullest cultural sense and that means specific actions being taken to make courses that are traditionally perceived as male turf courses accessible to women.

At a federal level, you cannot spell these things out, but you can certainly say: We are tying this funding to this kind of action and we are holding you accountable.

Some examples of standard of accessibility are the way that the courses are offered. They are offered at times of day where women cannot get away. Men may not be able to get away at those times, but there is a way in which universities and post-secondary institutions still assume that the clientele is a full-time clientele, and they run on that basis. So we would have to give a number of examples of how that assumption undermines the access of anyone who is studying part-time, whether or not they be male or female; it happens to be a majority of women.

I have mentioned hours but I could have mentioned the way we are the part- time staff does not have any security, so that the course can get annulled at the last minute.

Computer/science courses are inaccessible for various reasons, very often because of socialization of girls away from math and science, and the Science Council has done a very good job of documenting and illuminating this problem. Women are dropping out of the enriched math courses, the very courses that are the prerequisites to what they need to study even to become MBAs at the university level; so there is the prerequisite inaccessibility.

Then there is the way in which courses are packaged, the way in which they are delivered. If something is only available to full-time day students, then it is inaccessible to perhaps a single-parent mother studying at night.

Eligibility requirements for loans are still based on family income; and that creates an immediate problem for women, in that while they may not have any disposable income of their own, when family income is taken into consideration supposedly they have enough money to go to school, although they may not have that income at their disposal for education purposes and yet are disqualified from receiving loans.

In Ontario, at a community college level, students applying for studies in math, basic education, English-the basic kind of education that we are talking about for people to be able to make intelligent decisions about the future, and educate themselves for it-they have been cut off from student loans as of last August.

Then there is the inaccessibility in terms of the culture associated with various courses. Women continue to be offended, for instance in engineering faculties where they have an engineering-they call it a magazine, they dignify it by that name-that is right up next to pornographic. That is an illustration of the culture associated with certain areas of study, and that is almost a form of sexual harassment to women trying to come into that area.

My feeling is you do not need to be dealing with the nitty-gritty details. What you need to do is signal that these things have to be changed, because we are saying these courses, this kind of education has to be accessible, and if you make that kind of a policy commitment-which you at the federal level are in a position, it seems to us, to do-then, it is up to them to figure out what impedes, what is in the way, what we are doing wrong. Where are we misallocating our resources? Where should we be redefining courses where they are still teaching redundant skills for instance, and that is happening; it is epidemic across the country.