Prioritizing five programs will support new Ontario differentiation framework

“GBC said that the metrics that we use to measure our outcomes should be consistent and relate to colleges,” said Laura-Jo Gunter senior vice-president, academic.
Photo courtesy of George Brown College

Over the next three years, George Brown College (GBC) will be continuing to focus on five program areas of strength: culinary and hospitality management, arts and design, construction, community health, and business management.

“We focused in on the top five that we thought we would see sector growth and therefore enrollment growth over the next three years,” said Laura Jo Gunter, senior vice-president, of academic at GBC.

The college is prioritizing these particular programs because they are echoing Ontario’s Differentiation Policy Framework for Post-Secondary Education, which was released in 2013.

This provincial policy framework states that “encouraging institutions to focus on areas of program strength, will help to define their role in the post-secondary education system and better coordinate program offerings at a system level.”

However, the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities (MTCU) for Ontario, believes that this will help promote quality programming that is responsive to student needs and regional demands, and avoid unnecessary duplication.

The Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (OCUFA) disagrees with the ministry.

According to OCUFA’s document Frequently Asked Questions on Differentiation Agenda and Program Prioritization, “program prioritization” is not a neutral term, but “refers to an administrative process to rank all university programs and services according to a set of criteria, and then to make resource allocation decisions based on those rankings.”

OCUFA sees this agenda as “an attempt to incentivize universities to rationalize and downsize their operations in order to constrain the need for new public funding.”

Despite these concerns, having signed a Strategic Mandate Agreement (SMA) with the ministry, George Brown’s administration is adamant that they will not be downsizing their operations.

“Every program is offered based on both student demand and employment demand, so no specific program area is going to go away. They will still be strongly supported and we will still be teaching quality programming,” said Gunter. “Were seeing employment demand and student demand in those five areas specifically, and those are the areas we are going to focus on in terms of new programming or degrees.”

“We are going to pay attention to retention across the college, and we’ve started a whole new retention program and it’s going to be the highlight of our next academic plan, both at the divisional level and across the college to improve our retention,” said Gunter.

Regardless of the motivations behind the signing of the SMA, current and future college students will see the college focus on forging partnerships with other post-secondary institutions.

“We are working with the ONCAT grant (Ontario Council on Articulation and Transfer), OCAD University and Carleton University to do articulation, and create more joint programming in two areas; fashion and business,” said Gunter.  “We have a number of other ONCAT agreements as well to offer students wishing to transfer; we have an articulation with our general arts and science program into the University of Toronto.”