A state of the field review of post-secondary education : Post-secondary education

The middle three sections survey the literature in areas that are of considerable and widespread interest: Access and retention in PSE, learning outcomes in PSE, and the relationship between teaching and research in the university context. [...] The validity of the binary classification is further obscured in British Columbia, which in the early 1990s introduced a new concept in Canadian PSE, the “University College.” Established in response to a 1988 report by the Provincial Access Committee, the goal of the University College is to increase accessibility and retention by allowing students to study for a degree without having to move to [...] For the most part, this involvement has been initiated either under the auspices of the prerogatives of the Crown and the federal spending power, or as part of the federal responsibility for research, training, and economic development. [...] After dealing with the fiscal crisis of the mid-‘90s, the federal government began to substantially reinvest in PSE, with a renewed focus (especially with respect to the NCE program) on the applications of new technologies, the commercialization of research, and partnerships with the private sector. [...] The rationale for deregulation in PSE is by and large the same as it is in the corporate sector: centralized, top-down management is seen as slow and unwieldy, and in a highly competitive and rapidly changing market it is best to empower those with the most information about the market and the actual service or production processes with the responsibility for making decisions (MacTaggart and Assoc