Noah D. Arney

Category: Politics & News

  • Thoughts on “The Real World of College: What Higher Education Is and What It Can Be”

    A former twitter thread

    This is thoughts inspired by a book review of The Real World of College: What higher education is and what it can be, so take from that what you will.

    I empathize with what they’re talking about, and I have to assume that the book itself talks about this, but the shift isn’t a natural result of PSI’s movement. It’s a shift pushed by external factors.

    PSE has a few different stakeholder groups. Faculty and Staff, Parents and Students, Government and Board, Alumni and Community, and finally Industry and Professions.

    As the authors point out, the Faculty and Staff are pushing for transformational, so lets look elsewhere.

    Parents and Students overwhelmingly see PSE as a path to career. And they’re not wrong, it’s a well worn career trajectory that allows for a lot of variation. But in general they see transformational as being a good thing too as long as it helps career. So look outside the class.

    Industry and Professions maybe were a push toward transactional 20+ years ago, but now, because the advisors there tend to be the People Who Do The Thing in their areas, they love the transformational aspect of PSE and the transferable skills that come with it.

    I hear that in the US Alumni and Community have power over PSIs, maybe that’s good. It tends to be a slightly conservative hold trying to keep the institution looking like it always has. It’s not so much a push to something as an attempt to maintain a status quo.

    The Board and Government I think is where this shift happens. Through budget control, mandates, policy/guidance documents, hiring and tenure control, and control of the executive they have a massive amount of power.

    When power is used to meet government needs of increased employable people in certain areas to either build that area or decrease the cost of labour in that area (or unfortunately in service of an ideological goal) then it tends to be a strong push toward transactional PSE.

    How is that stopped? Well, in a democracy the government and the boards they appoint are supposed to be a reflection of the majority. So the way to change it is to be as public about the transformative nature of PSE as possible, and to be accessible in that.

    It’s not helpful if we talk about PSE as a transformative opportunity in a way that people don’t understand. It leads them to thinking that by transformative we mean something opposite to the ability to have a career at the end, or that it’s just academic jargon.

    We need to talk about how important a well rounded education with classes in many disciplines is, and how it leads to creative people who can think critically, can communicate with a wide variety of others, and are effective collaborators.

    We must push back against people seeing breadth requirements as being underwater basket weaving. Change the narrative about WHY we want students to take classes that aren’t about specific technical skills.

    Because if we change the narrative then politicians get more pushback from constituents when they call for removing discussion of race as something that impacts people. It would mean talking heads get seen as being silly when they complain about the worthlessness of college.

    Staff and Faculty are already on board. Students and Parents hear the narrative beyond the PSI, but are willing to go for transformational education if it also can be applied practically. Industry and Professions are already agreeing with us.

    Alumni and Community, except when they’re harnessed by politicians to score political points, are just a force for the status quo. The only stakeholders who seem to oppose transformative and favour transactional are politicians, so we need to change the narrative.

    We change the narrative by making transformational learning something that people understand. PSE tends to speak in technical terms to others who use those same technical terms. How do we explain it to those who don’t know those technical terms? That’s the way forward.

  • Transformation in Religious Display

    I recently went down to the San Juan Islands in Washington State. It’s a route I’ve been taking for about 30 years, and I remember the view from the Aerostar window and how it has evolved since the early 90s.

    Because I drove that route at least 3 times a year as a kid and at least twice a year as an adult I got very good at using the buildings as my guide post, noticing changes and the steady growth in the northern part of Whatcom.

    Well, moving to a different Province and then a pandemic changes things and it’s been about five years since my last trip down.

    For many years along the road I take there was a small chapel, just big enough a couple people. A place for you to pull off the road and have a moment of prayer. A couple years ago the chapel disappeared. Things like that happen when you only see a snapshot of the road once or twice a year.

    Further down the road there were several other churches, one I always noticed because they always had a big sign talking about how Jesus loved you and you were welcome at their church.

    This year things were different.

    Where the chapel had been was a large anti-abortion sign making some misleading statements and with the implication that 1) late term abortions were the most common (as opposed to less than 2%) and 2) they were some sort of intentional evil (rather than something that almost only happens if the life of the mother is in danger).

    Where the church with the welcoming sign had been there was still a building, but there was no longer a sign welcoming you, telling you that Jesus loves you, or even telling you the churches name. Instead a new sign was there urging you to defund Planned Parenthood.

    As I reflected on these changes it made me realize that this is what has happened in the US over the last 30 years. The Christian faith and prayer replaced with misinformation in support of their culture wars and political statements. White American Evangelicals replaced Christ, first with celebrity preachers, then with political influence, and now with explicit power over others. Maybe that was always the goal, and I was too young to understand it, maybe it’s a shift.

    What I know is that where a roadside chapel stood, now stands a sign with a lie on it, and where a church welcomed you, they’re now telling you to lobby the government.

  • Changing Employee Cohorts and Retention

    Originally two twitter threads: thread 1 thread 2.

    It took everyone a bit of time to notice this year, but the labour market shortage is basically being driven by mass retirements over the last two years, just not where you think (is the cultural moment for a Madisynn MCU reference past? Probably). Employment stats time. All of this is some back of the napkin calculations from Stats Can’s info on people accessing retirement benefits and leaving or entering the workforce.

    We know people have been pushing retirements a bit later, and recent stats back this up. In the last 9 years, as this has been happening there’s been an average of about 100K new retirees under 65 in Canada. It took a dive during the pandemic of 8% and 10%. So more people retiring a year or two or five later than they used to. As with every other economic shock, the pandemic made more people avoid early retirement a little. So fewer people retiring under 65.

    What you might not know though is that the number of people retiring at 65 went up during the pandemic, up 5.4% for men and 6.6% for women. Interesting, yes? So during the pandemic fewer people retired early, but more retired at the standard age.

    But we also have stats for those who stayed in the workforce well past standard retirement age. For those still working at 70 or above the retirement numbers during the pandemic jumped over 300% for men and over 900% for women. It’s not quite as drastic for the 66-69 group, but it’s still significantly increased. So all those people who delayed retirement before the pandemic decided this was the right time to retire.

    The question everyone was asking as this labour market tightening happened was: where are the workers? Well the people who were working well past retirement age have now retired. And that might not seem like a lot, but it’s about an extra 100 thousand people (over 65) leaving the workforce over the last last two years than was expected, and that’s not counting the over 5,000 people in the 20-65 age group who died in Canada from COVID.

    So the Baby Boomers are retiring, as was foretold. We expected this. But, even more impactful, the incoming age cohorts are shrinking, the current group of teens is 20% smaller than the current group of new professionals. The preparing for retirement cohort is the same size as the new professionals cohort, so the labour shortage isn’t going to go away any time soon, because the group of replacement workers coming up isn’t big enough to make an impact.

    What does this mean for retention then? Employers need to adapt, because young people have something they haven’t had since before 2006: options.

    What was a shortage in manufacturing, construction, and retail in 2018 has now hit health care and professional roles, and it will just keep going. I’ve been thinking a lot about this with the discussion regarding work-from-home, return-to-work, quiet quitting / work to rule, skills gaps, and the labour shortage.

    If you want your employees to go above and beyond you need to offer one of these things:

    1. intrinsic rewards: motivates staff to want to do more, like work that is impactful or fulfilling or helps them grow and develop in the ways they want to.
    2. extrinsic rewards: pay for the extra time and effort either through overtime, bonuses, or other tangible rewards.
    3. career development: people will do more for you if their positions are secure or if they have a path to promotion.

    Once upon a time these three were considered standard in a professional role, but over time as the number of professional roles have grown, they’ve decreased. That probably was because of labour oversupply. Retirement age got later and more people finished university so the total # of people wanting professional jobs went up much faster than the number of jobs. But that started shifting about 4 years ago, and rapidly in the last year.

    The retirement bump that was promised in 2000 didn’t materialize until right before the 2008 recession, so the cohort ready to move into those jobs didn’t get them as they were cut. But the seeds of the labour shortage were there. 2012 saw an outlier level retirement group. After that things cooled off for a few years, then in 2015 they started picking up steam again, and by 2018 statisticians could see that there was going to be a labour shortage. COVID19 layoffs obscured it for a while, but now that those layoffs are over we can see the result.

    The labour shortage that was expected in 2000 didn’t happen, the one in ’06 was offset by the recession in ’08, and the delayed cohort of young people was more than enough to cover what should have been a shock to the system in ’12. But demographics keep marching on.

    We’ve expected it 22 years, and now it’s here, and that’s a very good thing for young people (if inflation and housing prices don’t destroy the gains). Employers, look at those 3 things, if you don’t offer them, then your employees will get snatched up by an employer who does.

  • Automation and Career Development

    This was originally a twitter thread

    I’m seeing a lot of people talking about how people should go into HS only jobs or trades instead of university. Lets put aside that the unemployment rate for trades is often worse than jobs that require a university degree, instead I’ll tell you a story about the economy.

    I grew up in BC. And the alternative to university that was pushed when I was in high school was either the family farm (I lived in a farming community) or the lumber industry. FYI, this is a #CareerDevelopment story.

    It was the 90s and the lumber industry was strong. If you weren’t from a farming family the non-university jobs talked about were forestry/lumber, construction, plumber/electrician, and first responders. In the mill towns it was pretty much just forestry/lumber.

    The forestry and lumber industry was very people intensive. People to cut trees, people to plant trees, people to move logs, people to run the mills, people to support all of those industries, people to work in secondary industries (wood product manufacturing).

    So it’s the 90s and there’s about 100,000 jobs in the industry. They’re good jobs, well paid jobs. Most of them require no post-secondary or maybe a certificate.

    When I moved to Calgary five years ago the way people talked about the oil sands was exactly the way people talked about the lumber industry in BC when I was a kid.

    Now, I say that there were good jobs, and there were, but the number of jobs wasn’t really going up. And this doesn’t get noticed in the short term, but what it means is that the industry isn’t growing, which means the future won’t be bright for people trying to get in.

    Oh, productivity kept going up, the money the industry brought into the province kept going up, but employment was stagnant. That was never mentioned to teens looking to what their future could be though.

    So, what happened to that industry? Well, the 2000s happened. And at the end of it the industry had shrunk 50%. The 2000s were filled with talk about how we needed to “retrain” forestry and lumber workers.

    Magic bullet after magic bullet was proposed. The government started talking up trades, while ignoring the increasing trades unemployment rate. The jobs that had lower unemployment? Work that required a bachelors degree.

    FYI, here’s the Forestry & Lumber industry over 20 years. Yeah, it was bad.

    I talked in depth about the so-called Trades shortages about five years ago. TL:DR the only trades that have lower unemployment than bachelors degree requiring jobs are the ones that required two years of post-secondary apprenticeship program.

    That’s an important point a lot of people forget. Trades school in Canada is run through the same post-secondary system as Bachelors. The programs are generally 1/2 the length, but that’s it. So when I talk about post-secondary I mean Certs, Diplomas, Trades, and Degrees.

    What’s the point of this story?

    1. jobs that don’t require post-secondary are being automated
    2. once a resource extraction industry automates they never bring the jobs back
    3. people with post-secondary have an easier time changing industries when jobs disappear

    So, if you want to tell someone not to go to get a Bachelors degree, you’re still probably going to be telling them to go to post-secondary. That’s the way of the world now.

    As I look back on the people who talked up forestry when I was a kid I notice something. Most of them were let go when the mill automated or they changed industries in their late 40s. Some of them went to post-secondary then to retrain/reskill, and that’s a good thing.

    But here’s where it comes to Alberta. The same automation warning signs are there for the oil & gas industry. I had a student who I worked with a few years ago. He’d spent 15 years in the oil sands and decided to change jobs. Why? Because he saw the signs. He knew that his job was going to be automated in the next five years, so he decided to train now for the IT job that was going to replace 10 people who were doing what he was doing before.

    And that’s where we get back to #CareerDevelopment. Students need to learn not what the past industries were, but what industries are growing and flourishing. That is going to require post-secondary, of some kind.

  • Skills Assessment and Behaviourism

    This was going to be a short twitter thread, then it got too long, so I made a blog post instead. I read an opinion piece in the Toronto Star today and I’m concerned. Mostly I’m concerned about the train of thought it represents. The article, “We need to start giving soft skills more credit“, is the newest version of similar work around soft/transferable skills that’s been around for years, but now with AI.

    This seems like a good thing, because employers want employees with strong transferable skills, and colleges and universities already teach technical skills, and programs are designed so that students pick up transferable skills along the way. My problem is that the discourse is always focused on a behaviourist understanding of people. It presupposes that:

    1. Students must be explicitly taught something to learn it
    2. Evaluation means learning happened
    (more…)

  • Alberta Post-Secondary Roles and Mandates

    A snippet from my article for Communiqué

    The Alberta system of post-secondary education may be unique in Canada. As Alex Usher says, “Alberta not only has the closest thing Canada has to a genuine system of education, but the government is also by some distance the most interventionist in the country when it comes to universities” (Usher, 2019). The Albertan system has changed over the years from its single public university – the University of Alberta founded only three years after the province was created (Macleod, 2016) – to the current seven universities. Four of the universities are called comprehensive academic and research universities and three are called undergraduate universities (Types of publicly funded institutions, 2020). In addition to the universities, the province has eleven publicly funded comprehensive community colleges; two polytechnic institutions; five private universities; and the Banff Centre, a specialized arts and cultural institution.

    The Alberta system went through an overhaul in the first decade of the twenty-first century. New institutions were added, institutions changed from being colleges to being universities, and funding, which had been cut substantially in the 1990s, was increased (Usher, 2019). More importantly, in this decade was the 2007 introduction of The Roles and Mandates: Policy Framework for Alberta’s Publicly Funded Advanced Education System, which I will refer to as Roles and Mandates 2007. This document formalized the six-sector model that Alberta continues to follow today and laid out the goals and directions the system works towards. Although it has been superseded by 2019’s The Roles and Mandates: Policy Framework for Alberta’s Adult Learning System, referred to as Roles and Mandates 2019, the current structure of the Alberta system was formed by the 2007 version and so this inquiry will focus on the Roles and Mandates 2007 and the report that led to it.

    Read the rest here

  • Rhetorical Misuse

    There are some people whose rhetorical goal is to bring the reader/listener to a point of numbness where they feel that the topic is too complex to understand and they defer to the expert. This is especially used when talking with those who agree with the premises and conclusion that the speaker/writer has. Thus the reader/listener feels good because their view has been supported by an expert, and the writer/speaker feels good because they have received support.

    But in reality all that has happened is the linking of premise and conclusion with a bunch of wibbly wobbly rhetorical wimey stuff that isn’t a functional argument.

    This leads to polarization of belief as camps grow around the speaker/writer and they are combative with other groups around a different speaker/writer who disagree with the premises or conclusions, but because the speakers/writers never actually educated their groups but simply provided them with unlinked premises and conclusions the two groups turn their backs on each other because to admit that they don’t understand it is to admit that they might be wrong. It is to admit that they hold the premises and conclusions not because it’s true but because they received confirmation of their biases from an “expert”. It is to admit that their proof is based not on truth but on a misunderstanding or misrepresentation of the evidence or of the opponents perspective.

  • Oh… Canada…

    Nobody is perfect. It’s a common saying, but let’s really break it down.

    No person, past or present, is perfect. They have all done things that are wrong.

    We like to play pretend. Let’s pretend that George Washington or Louis Riel or Abraham Lincoln was a saint. We like to pretend that the founding fathers of Canada cared just as much about diversity as we do, or at least that they didn’t oppose it. We like to put people like Martin Luther King Jr. on a pedestal and pretend that he only did the things we consider ‘good’ and none of the things we disagree with. Or Nelson Mandela, or Mother Teresa, or any other popular figure. But it’s just pretend. They’re all people, and people are flawed.

    Groups aren’t amorphous independent entities, they’re made up of people. Those people have good actions, and those people have bad actions, and those people do both at various times. However, humans like to think that any group that they are part of or want to be part of are defined by the best people in that group, while groups that they aren’t in or don’t want to be in are defined by the worst people in that group. So we get groups like Black Lives Matter, the GOP, Greenpeace, the Catholic Church, etc. The people in these groups have both good and bad actions. Sometimes it’s hard to see past our preconceptions of the groups and look at the actual balance of good actions and bad actions rather than looking only at the good actions of some groups and only the bad actions of others.

    Here’s the secret. It’s possible to identify both good and bad things in people or groups. It’s possible to celebrate the good while at the same time condemning the bad. It’s possible to be part of a group while knowing that there are problematic aspects to it. It’s possible to celebrate it for what it does while at the same time identifying where it falls short.

    Identifying problems doesn’t mean something isn’t, on balance, good. At the same time identifying good things doesn’t mean it isn’t bad. In fact our ability to identify good and bad in something and then make a decision with the full knowledge that it isn’t perfect or evil is an important aspect of our humanity.

    Lets talk about Canada.

    Fancy Bebamikawe said it well on Twitter today:

    https://twitter.com/FancyBebamikawe/status/880822465152372736

    It is possible to see both that Canada is pretty awesome and provides great things, like basic health care and education, while also seeing that it’s pretty bad and incarcerates Indigenous people for offences that white people get probation for or a fine, or that they under-fund education on reserves. These two things aren’t mutually exclusive. They’re what make Canada. Canada is both the good and the bad.

    You can like how the Prime Minister worked with the people who set the Tipi up on Parliament Hill for ceremony this week as being an example of reconciliation while at the same time understand that his fighting the implementation of Jordan’s principle directly harms Indigenous children (a fight that’s been happening for a decade now). You can like that the Prime Minister is increasing the education funding beyond 2% for the first time in two decades while hate that it was his party who first froze that funding, something that’s affected a generation and a half of Indigenous people.

    Look at things with both eyes open. There are very few things that are perfect, and discussing the tarnish on them doesn’t harm those things, but rather puts them in their proper perspective. You can be proud of Canada while at the same time understanding where it has fallen short of it’s ideals. You can be proud of Canada while at the same time understanding that it’s historic ideals were what we’d call racist or regressive now.

    You can be proud of Canada while pointing out its flaws.

    Oh… Canada… we can be proud and aware at the same time. That doesn’t make us non-patriotic, but rather makes us better humans and better Canadians.