Let me explain the issue with respect to transfer of credits. What I'm getting at there is that notwithstanding the fact that these eight institutions provide applied degrees, all of which are recognized by their provincial jurisdictions as bachelor degrees, they cannot come to the province of Ontario, for example. And if they want to go and do a master's degree at Queen's University, those degrees are not recognized by Queen's University, because Queen's does not recognize any institution that is not a member of the AUCC. So the fact that they have recognized applied higher learning at a bachelor level is no guarantee of access into post-graduate work by our universities in one of the largest provinces of the country.
The outcome of that and in fact the reason the whole structure of polytechnics and colleges was begun with respect to the applied degrees was because the universities would not allow their graduates from diploma programs or certification to move into the university stream, so they went ahead and developed their own applied degrees. The challenge now is that Canadian students who can't get access to post-graduate work are leaving the country to go to the United States to pursue their graduate studies--unless they go to BCIT, which actually has a graduate program. So now our members are actually starting to look at graduate programs.
The point of this is that if we actually want to be competitive, we should be opening doors and not closing them. And we have to stop thinking in silos. We have to start thinking in terms of what's complementary. We describe it as the third pillar. How do we actually encourage somebody who may come into the work stream as an apprentice trade and decide that they actually would like to go further than that and end up with a diploma, and maybe go on to a BA and ultimately become an engineer? That's the kind of thinking we should really be encouraging, and we don't think that's in fact what's happening.