In an article for Globe and Mail, Jonathan Malloy (Carleton University) asserts that Canadians are taking their public postsecondary system for granted. Malloy begins by contrasting the US higher education system with the Canadian system, where the latter’s public universities offer a largely equal, high-quality education. He warns that Canadians’ tendency to treat universities like “utilities or commodities,” where price is the sole consideration, chips away at the accessible, equal-quality model that Canada currently enjoys. He concludes that this could lead to a situation where the quality and associated prestige of Canada’s universities could diverge, resulting in a situation where “where someone earned their degree […] will signify whether they were a winner or a loser in the higher ed status game.”
