Agents of Change: A Critical Analysis of Governing Actors in Alberta’s 2030 Higher Education Reform Plan
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Every province and territory in Canada has the authority to oversee higher education policies. In recent provincial and federal policy reforms, neoliberalism and academic capitalism have been gaining influence in Canadian higher education. This particularly applies to the policy reform plan Alberta 2030: Building Skills for Jobs, which was issued to develop higher education in the province. This paper critically analyzes the recent 10-year plan to reform Alberta’s higher education by combining Bacchi’s (2009) ‘What is the Problem Represented’ (WPR) approach and Chou et al.’s (2017) multi-actor framework. The purpose of this analysis is to provide insight into the actors and agendas affected by market-driven ideologies (i.e., neoliberalism and academic capitalism) on higher education policy in Alberta, Canada, with a focus on the abovementioned reform plan. The analysis underscores that the shift toward a profit-oriented approach challenges the traditional notion of higher education as a public good. This paper also discusses the implications of the reform plan and recommendations for its application.
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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 | 0.013 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.023 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".