Higher Education in the Service of the Economy: Education Ministry Reconfigurations and the Corporatist Agenda.

This paper discusses the increasingly corporatist mentality within higher education, focusing on the role of the government within Canada, and elsewhere, to reshape higher education into narrow occupational training. It notes that while governments in Canada and the United States have reduced public funding for higher education, they have pursued agendas of increasing accountability through quantifiable outcomes and the forced narrowing of education to production of the workforce. The paper cites numerous critics of the corporatist-conservative agenda who discuss the growing role of government and business in shaping and spreading this agenda. It examines recent efforts by local and provincial governments in Canada to reshape higher education ministries to focus on worker training, to the neglect or outright abandonment of the humanist emphasis of higher education. The paper concludes that the potentials of these trends and corporatist controls include the loss, for future generations, of the critical sensibilities necessary to evaluate and reorder the state/corporate agenda. (Contains 19 references.) (MDM)