The KPU Retirees Association has an active Advocacy Committee.
Headed by Geoff Dean, the primary thrust of this committee has been to highlight the discrepancy in funding for KPU in comparison with other post secondary institutions.
KPU and its predecessors – Douglas College, Kwantlen College and Kwantlen University College – have always been badly underfunded, never receiving much more than half of the operating funding per region resident that the rest of BC’s regional post-secondaries receive. As a result, KPU and its predecessors have never been able to serve our region nearly as well as the other regional post-secondary institutions in BC serve theirs:
As you can see, relative to the population of the region each of these post-secondary institutions is mandated to serve[1], KPU receives the lowest level of operating grants. The average 2021 grant per region resident was $145.90, but KPU received less than half that, only $70.74, which is 48.5% of the average.
Given the half-century of this shortchanging, KPURA is very glad that the Government of BC is finally conducting a review of how it funds our public post-secondary institutions. (See https://news.gov.bc.ca/releases/2022AEST0010-000461 for details about this Review). We’ve therefore made a submission to the Review team, asking them to ensure that funding for each of B.C.’s regional post-secondaries be strongly related to the size of the population of the post-secondary’s region, with a similar rate of per capita funding for all regional post-secondary institutions. This would mean at least a doubling of KPU’s annual operating funds, since KPU has always received about half of the funding, per region resident.
Our full five page submission, along with its appendices which include the actual numbers behind the above graph and much more, can be found at: https://www.kpu.ca/sites/default/files/retirees/KPURA_submission_to_BC_…
Feel free to share this, or any parts of it, with any others who you think may be able to help the Review team and the government make this long-necessary change.
[1] Since VCC and Langara are both mandated to serve the region of the city of Vancouver, their data is combined here.