Advanced Education Redux

While I wrote here yesterday about the UCFV press release, one thing I did not mention is that I wrote to the UCFV communications office. In my email to them, I said essentially what I wrote here yesterday – that they could have phrased things a little better.

Jane Jacobs in her book Dark Age Ahead writes about what I’ll dub credential creep; what used to be elite education (a university degree) has increasingly become mass education. With the societal push for everyone to become a certified whatever, the piece of paper has almost become more relevant than the skill it’s supposed to certify.

It’s only reasonable that universities (and university colleges, and community colleges, and anyone who can hang out a sign saying “get a certificate in …”) are trying to get a piece of the action.

I won’t reproduce the entire UCFV response here, but I will highlight a few passages.

“The evolution of universities from university-colleges is not unprecedented. UBC was once a university-college under the auspices of McGill University; UVic was once a university-college under the auspices of UBC. …. We believe that this natural development will increase the credibility of our degrees, including those that have gone before.”

That, ladies and gentlemen, is what how I feel they should have said it in the first place.

One other excerpt:

“Over the years we have had to verify the value of our degrees to various places that did not know what a university college is. For example, President Bassford has written to graduate schools explaining that we are full members of AUCC, that we are a public BC institution and that our programs are all vetted and approved by the province's ministry of advanced education. There simply is a tendency for many people to rate a credential more highly if it has the "university" name attached to it. This is truly unfortunate, because the situation is one of perception rather than reality.”

I wish them success in their campaign. Hopefully they'll come up with a suitable name - anything except Fraser University!