Looking ahead at 2026

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Hi, I’m Currents co-editor David Tough. Welcome to your weekly Peterborough Currents email newsletter!

Universities and especially community colleges have been struggling to adjust to the loss of a major source of revenue, after the federal government issued a cap on international studies visas. It’s a story we’ve been looking into, and this week I have some stray thoughts about tuition and student debt, prompted by Premier Doug Ford’s recent comments.

Let’s get right to it!

Doug Ford and the pedagogy of debt

by David Tough

Ontario’s provincial government announced earlier this month that it would allow post-secondary institutions to increase tuition fees. Alongside changes to the Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP) that would result in much higher levels of student debt, the move was met with outrage by students, many of whom evidently contacted Premier Doug Ford’s office directly.

At a press conference on Tuesday February 17, Ford responded by criticizing students’ enrolment decisions: “You have to invest in your future, in the in-demand jobs. Because a lot of the students – I’m not one to say – you’re picking basket weaving courses. And there’s not too many baskets being sold out there.”

Ford seemed to be using basket weaving as a shorthand for university courses or majors that are useless in the job market, for which there is no demand. If students are taking on debt to get a degree, they have to make smart, strategic decisions about what they study.

This is what Jeffrey Williams calls the pedagogy of debt: financing your education through loans makes students focus on job readiness; the need to pay back the money you’re borrowing is the main thing students learn by going to university, Williams argues, more than any content or skills you might learn in classes or in assignments.

Williams is opposed to the pedagogy of debt, while Ford is in favour of it, but Ford’s comment reveals a fundamental lack of trust in it. The public policy outcome of higher tuition and more debt is that students make rational calculations about future employability. And yet, Ford says, students persist in making bad decisions. Ford seems to fundamentally doubt that mechanism, even as his government intensifies it.

Also, why does Ford pick basket weaving to make this point? It’s weird, but it’s not accidental. There’s a long history of using basket weaving to refer to low effort courses, but its meaning has changed over time, as education has become more individualized, and more directly tied to personal success or failure in the job market.

The insult seems to originate in the mid-20th century; its full title at birth was underwater basket weaving, a transparently ridiculous skill. At that time, it referred to very easy courses that were ostensibly available to college athletes to pass with no effort, while they devoted their time to training and winning games. It did not include liberal arts courses like classics and history that required a lot of reading and writing, any more than it included math or chemistry.

It’s likely that it was later, starting in professional fields like engineering and computer programming, that students widened the pejorative term for any electives: courses that were less technical than their core courses, and less relevant in a very lucrative but highly competitive job market.

The term underwent some semantic spread, so that by the 1990s it was being widely used to dismiss any course not in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). This is the same period when anecdotes of arts graduates bagging groceries or philosophy PhDs driving cabs circulated widely. As debt rose, non-STEM majors were depicted as unemployable, as having made bad job-market decisions.

Somewhere along the way, the modifying ‘underwater’ was dropped, so that underwater basket weaving, a made-up non-thing, became basket weaving, which is a real thing. A specialized skill is now invoked without thought by people like Doug Ford as a synonym for uselessness.

As is so often the case with Ford, the signal-to-noise ratio is appalling: urging students to make careful decisions shouldn’t be an attack on all arts majors, and changes to provincial lending programs should not be made on the basis of shocking anecdotes about lavish spending.

If the intent of outbursts like Ford’s is to change students’ choices, that has already happened. Universities have already introduced a lot of new programs that essentially train graduates to work in a specific industry. Enrollment in the humanities plummeted in the early 21st century, as student debt rose, and has never fully recovered.

We as a society need people who can understand society and culture. Even if you believe post-secondary education should solely exist to fill positions in lucrative industries, you need to trust in policies to make that happen without messy rhetoric.