The government of Saskatchewan has received a consultant's report on the expansion of degree-granting in the province. The report recommends that "Institutions other than the University of Regina and the University of Saskatchewan should be able to offer degree programs".
If the Saskatchewan government adopts report's recommendations, the province will follow in the footsteps of British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, and Prince Edward Island -- all of which have permitted degree-granting in the non-university sector.
The consultant's report recommends that non-university degree-granting in Saskatchewan be adjudicated by a "quality assurance board". This would be wise, since the issue of authority to grant degrees is a sensitive one for many faculty and administrators. This is something I have witnessed up close.
Several years ago, when I was a policy adviser in the Ontario Ministry of Training, Colleges, and Universities, I worked with a team of civil servants tasked with sorting out the policy and funding issues that arose from a decision to set all Registered Nurse educational preparation at the baccalaureate degree level through adoption of a college-university collaborative program model. Because of the complex and sometimes strained nature of relations between the university and non-university sectors, the counter-idea of a college-granted applied degree in nursing was a periodic topic of discussion with stakeholders. I have since written about these issues in journal articles here and here.
In addition to that experience, in 2008 I was contracted by the Saskatchewan Academic Health Sciences Network to produce a review of baccalaureate nursing education program models. At the time, Saskatchewan was dealing with many of the same nursing education capacity issues that I had worked on in Ontario. My final report is online here. Here is a taste of what I had to say then about the issue of the community college applied degree in nursing:
Critiques of the applied degree in nursing have often focused on perceived deficiencies in the applied focus of community college programs as compared to the academic orientation of university programs. The notion of academic scholarship, individually defined by institutions and linked to institutional norms and values, is central to academic institutional life and the long-standing conception of what constitutes university-level education. The research and scholarly activities that are central to university missions have traditionally not fallen within the purview of institutions in the college sector. The role of college faculty is often more narrowly defined in collective agreements that do not provide significant recognition or remuneration for academic research activities. Moreover, the required teaching workload of college faculty can often make it difficult for them to engage in scholarly work. Considering the differing organizational and institutional priorities of colleges and universities, nursing degrees independently granted by non-university institutions are sometimes regarded as lacking the rigour of university granted academic degrees.
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