SkillPill emerges from growing concerns about
the changing role and purpose of higher education.

Over the past several decades, universities in Canada and around the world have become increasingly shaped by market-driven priorities. Education is often framed as an investment
in future earnings, students as consumers, and knowledge as something to be valued according to its potential economic value. At the same time, universities face growing pressure to demonstrate innovation, entrepreneurship, workforce readiness, measurable outcomes, and commercially valuable research (Metcalfe, 2010; Olssen & Peters, 2005).

These pressures contribute to what scholars have described as the neoliberal, corporate, or entrepreneurial university: an institution increasingly organized around competition, efficiency, performance metrics, managerialism, and market logic (Deem & Brehony, 2005; Giroux, 2002; Slaughter & Rhoades, 2010).

This raises an important question:

What happens to the university's public mission
when the value of education is increasingly measured by employability, efficiency, and economic return?

Critical inquiry, creativity, democratic participation, experimentation, collective learning, and social transformation are not easily measured. They take time. They require relationships, care, disagreement, uncertainty, and resources. Yet these are precisely some of the qualities that make universities vital public institutions.

Are universities under pressure?

These questions are not simply theoretical. Funding decisions and institutional priorities directly shape the everyday conditions in which students learn, faculty teach, and knowledge is produced.

In Ontario, the proportion of university operating revenue provided by the provincial government has declined significantly over several decades. More recently, changes to student financial assistance and continued concerns about postsecondary funding have intensified debates about who
can afford to attend university, which programs institutions can sustain, and which forms of education governments choose to prioritize (NUPGE, 2026; Whitaker, 2026).

The consequences of these transformations are not experienced equally.

Canadian campuses are increasingly diverse, yet persistent inequalities remain in access, representation, leadership, and educational experience. Racialized, Indigenous, disabled, LGBTQIA+, first-generation, and other equity-deserving students continue to encounter different structural barriers within higher education.

At the same time, rising costs of tuition, housing, food, transportation, and everyday living shape who can complete a university education and under
what conditions.

Universities themselves are also making difficult and contested decisions about programs and resources. In 2025, for example, York University paused admissions to several undergraduate programs, including Gender and Women's Studies, Sexuality Studies, Indigenous Studies, Classics, Sociology, and several language programs. While the university describes these changes as pauses rather than closures, students and faculty have raised concerns about their implications for humanities and equity-oriented education (York University, 2025; Oatley, 2025).

These developments are part of a much broader public debate about what and whom universities are ultimately for.

Public resources also reflect competing societal priorities.
Major investments in areas such as defence coexist with ongoing debates over inadequate funding for postsecondary education, healthcare, environmental protection, housing, and other public systems.

SkillPill asks us to consider what these choices reveal about the knowledge, institutions, and futures we collectively choose
to value.

When education is increasingly understood as a financial investment, the question is no longer simply:

What do I want to learn?

It becomes:

What can I afford to learn?

Will I get a job if I study what I love?

Which degrees are considered marketable?

Which forms of knowledge are considered worth investing in?

And perhaps most importantly:

Who gets to decide
my future?

What would a university look like if its primary responsibility were to the public good?

What if accessibility, critical inquiry, care, creativity, collaboration, ecological responsibility, and social transformation were treated as essential educational outcomes rather than optional extras?

What knowledge should universities protect even when it cannot easily be monetized?

What should universities stop doing?

And what should they become?

SkillPill is also a project to reimagine alternatives with you. Learn more about participating in the study.