Theatre and French – Vital To Education and Income

A Self-Sustaining Post-Secondary Business Model Wisely Includes Theatre and French

It is possible to obtain government and healthcare jobs or to excel in business without a college diploma or university degree and the thousands of dollars in tuition fees associated with them, so if someone is going to bother paying for a post-secondary education you want to take the courses that will get you a great-paying job in your field instead of becoming a heavily in-debt barista. Theatre and French courses are exponential advantage providers to those who take them even if they are not available as a program Major or Minor.

People often seem shocked when they first encounter the idea. I can get a job with the government or in healthcare without a post-secondary education? Yes! For example, you can take a 40-hour course to become a certified First Responder and be hired to provide preventative or emergency care in rural and remote communities in Canada. Or in many cities you can become certified as a lifeguard, work at a municipal pool and now you are officially a city employee who is prioritized for other job openings applied for and whose time served as a lifeguard now counts towards your pension. Want to excel in business? Read Tim Ferris’s blog about creating your own real-world MBA and grab a current copy of Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki (and if you like it then read his advanced book Why The Rich Get Richer), then decide if you want a Business degree. After reading the blog and books you might decide to use the money you had set aside for tuition for a business investment instead.

It is incredibly important to our well-being as individuals and as a society for each person to pursue a journey of life-long learning and of gaining knowledge and skills that will equip each of us to contribute constructively to our communities, and post-secondary education can absolutely play a role in that. However, the idea that you need post-secondary education to have a great job and a great life is a message primarily perpetuated by the post-secondary education business industry. And yes, it is a business industry, do not let anyone ever tell you differently. Non-profit business models do not mean that there is no profit, just that the profit is channeled back into the mission rather than paid out to shareholders. When you come to understand that colleges and universities are businesses and not altruistic humanitarian organizations looking to lift people out of lives of suffering, then being in tremendous amounts of debt and relying constantly on donations to keep going stops making sense. That’s a terrible way to run a business and post-secondary education is one of the only industries that gets away with it. If your gym started sending you, a paying customer who finished up a four-year membership after reaching your fitness goals, regular mail asking for donations to keep making fitness available to other people who want to live healthier lives, you’d likely question what they thought they were up to and why on earth they need no-strings-attached funds to keep their business going…

If you are going to pay an incredible financial investment to a post-secondary business then you want to be in the position to earn an income that justifies having done so which requires having the credentials to get the job and the level of excellence to excel in that job. And universities need to run their businesses knowing that students don’t need them so they better be offering something AMAZING to justify the time and money being asked for. Theatre and French courses are the program-enhancers and electives that throw open more valuable doors of opportunity right out of the gate for graduates from all streams of study.

Training in Theatre is a key determining factor in whether a psychologist is in high demand for being able to help a client engage with their life narrative and find meaning in the midst of challenge or whether they have very few bookings because they keep telling people to snap an elastic band on their wrist to stop thinking bad thoughts. Theatre training takes a person with a business degree from an over-qualified worker bee to a business professional on an accelerated path of promotion for their ability to read and engage their teammates and clients.

What many people do not know about Theatre is that it is a multi-disciplinary discipline and a prime application of how humans learn best! We know that learner-centered, experiential education is the most powerful teaching method. While other disciplines have students sitting at their desks listening to another lecture, students in Theatre classes are constantly up and moving and engaged in active discussions. Theatre is not just ‘art’, it is Science in motion. The study of Theatre is the study of psychology, sociology, kinesiology, and history. The scientific method is in constant application as theories are developed and experiments conducted. You want to play an obese character? That’s what fat suits are for. Actors learn that their body is a tool for communication and learn how to care for it and use it to their full advantage to convey whatever message they are trying to get others to buy into. To think Theatre is an art that is frivolous, or worse, disposable is foolish and a reflection of not understanding the discipline. As story-telling beings, people are drawn to opportunities to use their voice, to play, to live, to hear stories and learn to tell our own, to be in community, to be challenged, to explore our limits, to learn we are more than we imagined and able to push past our limits each time we think we’ve encountered them. Theatre teaches us resiliency, how to trust other people to have our backs, to trust ourselves. If you could pick only one thing to study in order to try and increase your chances of living a life you feel was successful, purposeful and worth living, then pick Theatre. With the skills you learn there you can go on to do anything else.

However, if that’s the case, why don’t more people take Theatre as a Major or Minor? For two reasons, first, because the fear of public speaking is the only fear so prevalent that it rivals the fear of death and if Theatre courses are advertised primarily as “performing arts” studies then a lot of prospective students see them as courses to actively avoid, like an arachnophobe deciding to not take a class promising to pour a bucket of spiders on their head. Post-secondary schools often make mistakes in their language around Theatre courses and would find more of the registration they are looking for if they were more clear that Theatre Arts & Sciences courses are where you find a supportive and constructive environment to work on overcoming that fear. These courses are where you can find your voice and learn how to own the space you take up, drawing people in to Listen to what you have to say so you can be authentic without being controlled by fear.

The second reason is simple. While many people do not want to see the light, community, and ongoing growth opportunities of Theatre ever leave their lives, many people also know they don’t want to do “Theatre” for a living. Theatre for many is life-enhancement and career-enhancement and while university students may not want to study Theatre as a Major or Minor, a very large percentage will take Theatre courses if the opportunity is communicated to them correctly and made possible by room in their other program requirements to take the courses as electives or even made a required component of their other studies. Redeemer had this strength and then dropped it, with the ability to pick the courses and the phenomenal staff teaching them back up again becoming increasingly difficult the more time they allow to go by. This is another lesson in good business management. If you make a mistake like this, it is worth it to set aside pride and put on the table the resources needed to recover the phenomenal staff you insulted before someone else scoops them up. Think that’s an unwise use of money? Turnover costs more.

Redeemer may want to review if they are going to offer courses like Theatre Law which has a limited application for students very specifically wanting to enter the Performing Arts industry and which they could take through another institution (a partnership Redeemer can arrange easily enough), but no course that teaches the Art and Science of Theatre should ever be placed on the chopping block. If a leader sees fit to chop it, I would suggest that leader needs the opportunity to be educated further about the value of Theatre or that you need a new leader.

Fluency in French makes a big difference between getting a government job as a drone or shaping the future of Canada in a management position overseeing French and English staff and serving a bilingual nation. French is an official language in many countries, opening employment opportunities around the globe for those who speak it fluently. Because of the influence of insulated Anglophones who saw no use for French language learning because there was no immediate need for it in their personal vicinity, a language crisis is currently underway with tensions rising between provinces and territories and with employers desperately seeking people who are bilingual.

Where the broader need, appeal, and income opportunity is found is in offering French Courses equipping students and the general public to earn their Government of Canada language proficiency levels! Redeemer University has the opportunity to pursue having its French professors certified as Language Assessors which means that rather than issuing a test designed by the professor in order to issue a course grade for the student’s transcript, a standardized test would be administered so that the student has a Government of Canada record showing their level of proficiency in reading, writing, and oral interaction.

Becoming a recognized learning centre where government language proficiency levels can be obtained is a great income opportunity for Redeemer and obtaining a CBC/CBC level designation opens huge doors of opportunity in public service and across our bilingual nation for those who take the courses! Many adults who missed the boat and didn’t take French studies in university have to make up for that mistake later in their career when they realize their language skills are holding them back. There are a lot of people in the Southern Ontario region who are kicking themselves and would want to sign up for French at Redeemer if the proficiency levels could be obtained there.

If you’ve bothered to pay for and put in the time to get a university degree then French helps you get a good job and Theatre helps you excel in that good job so you can earn top dollar. Theatre could be retired as a Major but kept as Minor, and French could be retired as a Major but never retired as a Minor as the Education students have an Excellent shot at employment if they can teach French! Even if the school decided to retire these studies as Majors and Minors, the courses themselves should never be retired from Redeemer’s offerings. Having formal Theatre and French studies available is a critical part of the school’s ability to become self-sustaining and a critical part of students obtaining employment that justifies having pursued the path of post-secondary education to obtain it.

A Self-Sustaining Post-Secondary Business Model Means Leveraging Your Resources So People Pay YOU To Advertise To Them and Theatre and French Play An Important Role In This

Redeemer keeps making the mistake of paying for advertising on Youtube, demonstrating a fundamental misunderstanding of how the platform works and the audience they are trying to appeal to. Youtube is a platform for Content Generators, meaning people creating something that others want to watch, and students are pretty much non-stop content-generating machines. If Redeemer put together a group of students responsible for managing the review, editing, and uploading of video content recorded or created by students to Redeemer’s youtube channel (hello Media students) it would not take long for the school to hit the markers for earning revenue which could offset tuition costs. The more videos students contribute of performances (Theatre plays a KEY role in content generation), sporting events, lectures, coffee houses, student presentations, science labs and experiments, and life on campus the more there is to watch, the more revenue can be earned, the more people see what life at Redeemer is all about and why they want to be a part of it, and the lower the tuition costs go down to attend there.

Concerns around the use of student images have evolved over the years. Students now live in a world where you can pretty much expect to be on camera at all times. There are ways to make this a collaborative process with the students so that it is a community project and not an invasion of space or privacy.

The third semester (SUMMER!) is a prime time to leverage existing resources to get people to pay YOU to advertise to and recruit them. Offering tuition-free credits and room and board to third and fourth-year Redeemer students (who successfully apply) in a multitude of disciplines being offered at the school would make it possible to run a high-school-age “Summer Camp U” program that allows high school students to explore their interests in a fun way to see if pursuing university studies in that subject is what they want to do. Parents will happily pay hundreds of dollars for their high-school-age child to get a taste of university life for three weeks (which means the school could run two 3-week sessions per Summer!) so they can confirm what they want to study and not pull a classic ‘first-year flush’ sending a year’s worth of tuition money down the toilet spent on a school or discipline they don’t actually want to pursue. A three-week camp session would let the Theatre camp group put together a full-length production to perform, the Science camp group to conduct multiple exciting and interesting experiments, the Sports camp group to put themselves in the role of being a teacher or coach. History camp, Business camp, Psychology camp, all the disciplines Redeemer has to offer being made available in a fun introductory way while familiarizing paying high school students with the school’s facilities, students, and faculty. There is so much opportunity here.

Facility rentals are always an option for an institution with fabulous spaces to rent out, but the problem with relying on this too heavily as an income generator is that it has the opportunity to displace both your primary mission (ie. don’t rent out spaces that mean your staff and students don’t have access to space they need for their programs) and displace higher income opportunities. Go ahead, rent out the board room or other spaces used only infrequently. But otherwise, run with the tuition-free credits (Fast Track Credits!) where students can apply to run programs that students and the public pay to participate in. Have two Business students interested in human resources certified as First Aid Instructors and put them in charge of offering first aid courses to the students and the public (Standard First Aid with CPR Level C and AED Training is another mega-employment booster!). Have two Theatre and two Phys Ed students run a Get Snatched fitness class for people who want to gain the physical fitness and fierceness found in Theatre. For the same reasons that people love Zumba and drumming classes, people love Snatched fitness because it’s fun and they feel like they are living rather than exercising. Have two French students facilitate French Cafe coffee and conversation sessions for people who want to practice their French. Use the Summer Camp U template to create a program that runs during the year with third and fourth-year students running evening programs for high school students.

These are only a few opportunities worth exploring. The point is, if you’re paying to advertise to people hoping they will apply to go to your school, you’re doing it wrong.

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