Q. Why in the past decade or so has Vancouver University Worldwide focussed on its aggregate-learning ('external') degree process and worldwide affiliates, rather than its BC constituent colleges' programming?

A. We would like to have done much more in BC and other Canadian provinces, but the politics of postsecondary education in BC and Canada (the excessive favouring of public postsecondary institutions) frustrated us. [For a similar history - that of Frontier College - see Gwen Crossan, The University in Overalls.., Cdn. Jnl. of Univ. Cont.Ed., Spring 2001]. Paradoxically, our decades-old 'external' degree process and function was initiated in response to an ongoing Canadian postsecondary structural situation, the most recent documentation of which is to be seen in Figure 1.1, A Report on Adult Education and Training in Canada, Statistics Canada-HRDC, 2001 [Note the globally-atypical Canadian "non-university tertiary" level]. The Canadian tertiary institutions which ought logically to have actively supported our external degree process over the years have never done so - but now, in conjunction with new-found PLA enthusiasts in some public universities and government bureaucracies, they are currently seeking to replicate our 'Enhanced PLA' concept and role. (This being only one instance of public institutions eventually copying our innovations - innovations which previously they rejected). Also paradoxically, and inconsistently, most Canadian provinces have generally supportive policies respecting independent schools at the elementary and secondary levels.

One financial setback has been the particular implemenation of a program of the BC Government in which it - and indirectly sometimes the Canadian government - matches 100% any donation given to a BC public university or college. This otherwise commendable measure unfortunately was not extended to BC's only secular non-profit university. The public - and indirectly donors - thus perceive a donation to a public institution as twice the substance of one to Vancouver University. Donations to Vancouver University have proportionately shrunk. (Conversely, as alluded to above, BC provides 50% funding to independent schools).

Another problem, during most of the Nineties, has been a particular set of other discriminatory actions by the BC bureaucracy: Seminary of Christ the King, Trinity Western University, and Vancouver University are exempt from BC's vocational schools act, but the bureaucracy kept trying to nudge Vancouver University into accepting that inappropriate school regime. The discriminations included suddenly and arbitrarily cutting off our constituent colleges' Student Loans and Grants standing - with no legal justification. (We are awaiting restoration by the Campbell Government).

The foregoing and other aspects of the past short-sighted, self-defeating politics of postsecondary education in British Columbia and Canada are further detailed here.

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