The Problem of the Skills Gap Agenda in Canadian Post-Secondary Education.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The mismatch between graduates’ skills and the needs of the labour market is a continuing discourse in Canada and on a global scale. Yet, arguments on how to restructure PSE are not united. Given these competing discourses, we ask the following research questions: What should we make of the various representations of the skills gap, and how are contemporary PSE students positioned in this discursive space? We use Bacchi’s problem representation approach to policy analysis to examine four policy actors’ statements influencing Canadian PSE to examine the discourses surrounding the perceived skills gap in Canadian PSE. We argue that, while these policies call for disparate PSE reforms, they are all underpinned by the same neoliberal rationality. The different calls for reform reflect a harmonized and complementary set of discourses that reify PSE students as a single subject—a one-dimensional, homogenous, economic subject, devoid of difference. We suggest discourses that position PSE students as political actors in determining their education and roles in a democratic society are needed.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.038 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".