A Conversation with the Minister

This article is gratefully provided as a partial reprint of a two-part series written by University of Calgary Gazette writer Greg Harris. The full article is available from www.ucalgary.ca/unicomm/Gazette/ gazette.html issues dated Sept. 20 and Oct. 4, 1999.

University of Calgary Gazette writer Greg Harris recently caught up with Lyle Oberg, Alberta’s learning minister. Oberg spoke to Harris on a range of post-secondary issues. The following except from a full interview is reprinted with Gazette permission. The full article is available starting at www.ucalgary.ca/unicomm/Gazette/Archives/Sept20-99/

Gazette: What, in your opinion, are the biggest challenges facing universities in Alberta?

Oberg: I think the single biggest challenge facing universities in Alberta is access. We’re going into an era where kids that graduate from university are going to have a two-and three-per-cent unemployment rate, whereas kids that come out of high school are going to have a 15-per-cent unemployment rate. So it’s my job as minister of learning to ensure that the spots are available for these people, as they come out, to be able to go to university and get a post-secondary diploma or degree.

Gazette: Do you have any immediate plans then for addressing the access challenge?

Oberg: Obviously I have to work with the universities and the technical institutes to try and expand them. What I’ve talked to them about is a key concept that I feel in education today and that’s flexibility and responsiveness. They need to offer programs where there are jobs out there, and we all recognize that things change. If you had predicted seven or eight or nine years ago that there would be 300,000 empty jobs in ICT, they would have called you crazy. It has to be a flexible, responsive system to what the need is out there. If that means dropping degrees, if that means putting a degree in for two years and then two years down the road they see that the need is not there for it and change it, then so be it – that’s what has to happen.