Grade 11 student Alex Taman will graduate in the double cohort, when the abolishment of the OAC year in high school will flood the post-secondary education system with thousands of extra students. She’s not looking forward to it.
“[The post-secondary education system] knew this was coming. There will be 75,000 students knocking on the front door, and they aren’t ready,” said Taman, a student at Danforth Collegiate Technical Institute.
Taman spoke at a forum at Ryerson University on Tuesday addressing post-secondary education and the challenge of dealing with the double cohort.
Among the speakers were Michael Prue, MPP and member of the NDP party, Dr. David Noble, York University professor and outspoken critic of educational technologies, and Alex Lisman, RyeSAC’s VP of education.
“Education is being shipped away and those that are missing out are the ones at a socio-economic low,” said Michael Prue.
“Students are paying more and getting less. Higher tuition fees are subsidizing the commercial aspect of education. If you walk on any campus you can see that, from Pepsi schools to advertisements on urinals,” asserted Noble.
The forum was a lead-up to the day of action held on February 6, put on in an effort to publicize the most pressing challenges to post-secondary education.
“We feel three things now: anger, frustration and fear. We’re guinea pigs, and with the new curriculum we will all burn out,” Lisman stated.
He explained, “The only thing the government has been doing to accommodate the double cohort is the Superbuild program. But they are only buildings. [The provincial government] is not taking into account new teachers, instructors and maintenance. They need to freeze the fees, be on a grant not loan system and restore public education. Public education is a right and we can’t take any more cuts.”
