Dismantling Alberta's Post-Secondary Education System With Help from McKinsey & CompanyOn June 11, Alberta Premier Jason Kenney announced his government had signed a $3.7 million contract with McKinsey Calgary, subsidiary of a giant global U.S. management consulting firm, to review the province's post-secondary education system. McKinsey & Company or "The Firm" is the biggest management consulting company in the world; many of its employees have become CEOs of major corporations or key government officials. Former McKinsey managing partner Dominic Barton is now Canadian Ambassador to China. Former employee Robert Greenhill became president of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA).
None of the four McKinsey Calgary partners claims expertise in post-secondary education. In fact, three of the four state their main area of expertise is service to the oil and gas industry, while the other focuses on executive coaching. How this qualifies them to review post-secondary education is anybody's guess. But then again, the current Minister of Advanced Education came to his position from providing communication consulting to the private sector. His only post-secondary teaching experience is in business schools, which actually do not belong in universities since they non-critically treat business as self-evidently good. This is not to say that McKinsey & Company has never produced reports on post-secondary education. For example, in 2012, they published Rethinking 101: A New Agenda for University and Higher Education System Leaders. None of the report's recommendations come as a surprise. They just recycle the usual ramblings of reactionary governments, for example, more partnerships with industry, outsourcing services, cutting employee benefits, eliminating "non-core" activities, and consolidating courses. The report says nothing about student learning conditions or instructor teaching conditions and how they can be improved. The report treats education as a business that needs to be run more "efficiently," which is pretty much how McKinsey Calgary will treat Alberta post-secondary education. The second reason the selection of McKinsey seems strange is that a number of companies it has advised have subsequently experienced some of the biggest business fails of recent decades. They include the collapse of Enron, the fall of drugmaker Valeant, the failure of hedge fund Galleon, and various shady deals linked to the Gupta brothers in South Africa. Further, McKinsey has provided controversial recommendations for some questionable clients, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement under the Trump administration, Saudi Arabia, and U.S. drug maker Purdue Pharma. McKinsey's advice to Purdue focused on how to boost opioid sales. Purdue now has $12 billion in lawsuits against it for starting and sustaining the opioid crisis. The UCP appears to be quite cozy with McKinsey. On May 1, 2019, the UCP hired former McKinsey employee David Knight Legg as chief advisor on trade and finance. He has accompanied Kenney on several overseas investment trips. On June 5, UCP Minister of Advanced Education Demetrios Nicolaides publicly cited a 2015 McKinsey report called Youth in Transition, highlighting conclusions that only 34 per cent of employers and 44 per cent of students believed they were prepared for the workforce. This fits perfectly with the UCP agenda to more closely tie education to providing free training for the monopolies. Since being elected in 2018, the UCP has implemented a number of "reviews" to try to fool the people of Alberta into supporting their policies. Each time they have ensured that those who conduct the charade will come to the UCP's predetermined conclusions and the McKinsey review will be no exception. Much of it will likely be neo-liberal boiler plate. If the review includes any real consultation with the people of Alberta, everything that contradicts the predetermined conclusions will be ignored. The UCP will then brag that both the experts and the public fully support their review and its conclusions.
The $3.7 million UCP review implies that there is some big mystery about what needs to be done in regard to post-secondary education in Alberta but there is no mystery. Just for starters, here are four steps which many have suggested should be taken as soon as possible. First, the right to education must be legislated. Second, funding to education must be greatly increased. Third, student fees must be frozen, then decreased and finally eliminated. Fourth, the practice of exploiting faculty by hiring them as "sessionals," with no job security, no benefits, and inadequate salaries must be stopped. These four steps alone will go a long way to reinvigorating post-secondary education in Alberta so that it can better do its real job, which is contributing to the advancement of society by serving the public interest.
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At first glance,
the United Conservative Party's (UCP) selection
of McKinsey to review post-secondary education
seems strange. According to McKinsey biographer
Duff McDonald, the company "provides strategy
and management consulting services, such as
providing advice on an acquisition, developing a
plan to restructure a sales force, creating a
new business strategy or providing advice on
downsizing." Clearly, none of these services
relate to education. However, they certainly do
not contradict the ongoing neo-liberal campaign
to defund and privatize post-secondary education
and further make it the handservant of industry.
Perhaps the most
nauseating aspect of the post-secondary
education review will be how the upper
administrators of various Alberta post-secondary
institutions will unhesitatingly welcome the
"findings," whatever they may be. This has been
the pattern so far even when the UCP cuts to
post-secondary education funding have resulted
in lost jobs, hiring freezes, cancelled
programs, increased tuition fees, discarded
libraries, and so on. Such destruction is
obsequiously accepted by top post-secondary
institution administrators accompanied by
mindless mantras like "We must adjust to the
current fiscal realities." Of course, one reason
administrators cave in to the UCP's
anti-education campaigns is that in August 2019,
the UCP replaced the existing chairs of many
post-secondary education institutions' boards of
governors with their own agents, mainly from the
energy industry.