Natasha Mrkic-Subotic: We need a tiered system: full review for degree programs, fair enough, but also an expedited pathway for employer-partnered micro-credentials and short-cycle skills training
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The Avison report on B.C.’s post-secondary sector is on the government’s desk. Inside our colleges and universities, good people are burning out, being laid off, and watching the world change faster than the system will allow them to move.
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I have watched colleagues get laid off across the post-secondary sector during the past year. Some were pushed into early retirement. Others just left, exhausted. The ones still standing are doing more work with fewer people, inside the same structures, with the same red tape, and no real power to change anything. They have ideas, good ones. New courses that would meet what employers need right now. But the approval process takes so long that by the time a program clears it, the moment has passed. That is not a funding problem, it is a structural one.
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When I wrote in these pages a few months ago that Canada’s post-secondary system was hitting a breaking point, I meant it as a warning. It has since become a description.
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Former deputy minister Don Avison spent months consulting across the sector for his report on governance, program delivery, and long-term financial sustainability. What he heard was not a surprise to anyone working inside it.
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The B.C. Federation of Students counted more than 80 programs paused, suspended, or cancelled. The revenue collapse from lost international student tuition runs to $300 million a year, and layoff notices have gone out several times at institutions in the province.
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After his final meeting with the sector, Avison emphasized that special-purpose teaching universities, colleges, and polytechnics had moved far beyond their original mandate and that the status quo is no longer viable. Most people in the sector would tell you they knew that five years ago.
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Thompson Rivers University’s vice-president of finance, Matt Milovick, said it plainly in March: “There’s no help coming. No one’s giving us a bucket of money. We knew from the beginning this was going to be our problem to solve.”
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Here is what makes this moment different from every other post-secondary funding crisis in memory.
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The world outside these institutions is not pausing while we sort out our governance. AI is now handling legal research, financial analysis, medical diagnostics, software engineering, and creative work simultaneously, across every sector at once.
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Previous technological shifts took decades to ripple through labour markets. This one is not.
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Over 100,000 people lost AI-driven jobs in 2025 alone. In the first months of 2026, another 45,000 technology positions have disappeared globally. Amazon cut 30,000 roles. Chegg, the education technology company, laid off nearly half its workforce because students stopped paying for human tutoring and went directly to AI. Think about that. An education company hollowed out by the same disruption our institutions have been slow to address.
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Harvard Business Review recently argued that the companies surviving the next decade will not be those with the best algorithms, but those with the courage to abandon how decisions get made. The same logic applies to universities and colleges. We are consensus machines. Every significant decision gets routed through layers of process that made sense when industries changed slowly. They do not change slowly anymore.
