[HotHotHeat]

Great piece this morning from the Herald about what it means being a high school grad with post secondary ambitions in Alberta.

Imagine for a moment the following scenario: Your child, who's in Grade 11, finishes his or her year with an 80 per cent gradepoint average as a final mark. Then, a few weeks later, you receive a letter from your local school board informing you that your beloved Johnny or Janey didn't make the cut and won't be able to get into Grade 12 because this year, you need 85 per cent to move on.

. . .

Mount Royal had 10,785 qualified applicants in 2007. Of those, 5,900 were admitted and a whopping 4,885 were turned away, to seek their educations elsewhere or to put their futures on hold for now or indefinitely. During the same year, 871 qualified applicants attempted to get into Mount Royal's four-year nursing degree program. How many were admitted? Just 314. The other 557 moved on to who knows where?

This at a time when it's acknowledged that Alberta has a severe nursing shortage and as a result, regional health-care board budgets went into the red by tens of millions of dollars mostly because of the overtime nurses are being paid.

"We have the lowest university level participation rate out of high school in Calgary in the country and that is largely due to supply and demand," said Marshall, who in his short five years in his post has turned the esteemed college into a university, only the province continues to refuse to let the college change its name to reflect that reality. Alberta has only 0.9 universities per one million residents whereas B.C. has 2.7, Saskatchewan 2.1 and Nova Scotia has 10.9, according to Statistics Canada figures from the 2006 Census.


I don't know what else to add. Unbelievable.

http://www.canada.com/calgaryherald/...7-7ac1b8ab26fe