Adult basic education is a provincially funded program that reduces poverty, promotes reconciliation and improves the school performance of the children of adult learners. It is effectively cost-free to the provincial government. In fact, it produces a net fiscal benefit for our fiscally challenged province, as demonstrated in a recent study titled Fiscal Benefits of Adult Basic Education in Manitoba.
Adult basic education includes adult learning centres (ALCs) that offer the mature high school diploma to adults who had not previously finished high school, and adult literacy programs that bring adults up to high school entry level.
In the first four months of 2025 I led a cost/benefit study of adult basic education in Manitoba, working with Fran Taylor, long-time adult educator, Mary Agnes Welch, partner at Probe Research, a professional market and public opinion firm in Winnipeg, and Niall Harney, senior economist and Errol Black Chair in Labour Issues at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives-Manitoba.
We surveyed adults who had graduated two, three, four and five years ago at five ALCs in different parts of Manitoba—two in Winnipeg, one in The Pas, one in Altona and one in Boissevain/Killarney—and asked them questions about what they were doing before starting at their ALC, and what they were doing now that they have graduated. We surveyed 1005 graduates and 292 responded, a strong response rate of 29 percent. This was a census-style survey, for which every graduate had an equal opportunity to participate. The profile of those who responded was largely consistent with that of the total population of adult learners.
The results of the survey were remarkable
We asked: Do you agree or disagree with the following statements? “I’m happier now than I was when I started classes at the adult learning centre;” “My kids benefitted from me getting my high school diploma;” and “I feel like I’m well on my way to a good life.” Ninety percent responded yes to each. Happier people are likely to have more stable family lives, with kids doing better in school, and people saying they are well on their way to a good life means they have the self-confidence and self-esteem, and the sense of optimism, needed to make a success of their lives. Adult basic education is transforming the lives of these graduates and their families.
We found that 243 of the 292 graduates who responded to our survey were either working full-time or part time or were taking further post-secondary courses that would eventually lead to employment—that’s a remarkable 83 percent of respondents to the survey. We calculated the savings to the provincial government because of the number of graduates who have left Employment and Income Assistance (EIA), and the increased income tax revenue accruing to the provincial government because of the number of graduates now employed full-time. Then we extrapolated those fiscal benefits to the entire population of adult learners in Manitoba.
What we found is that the net fiscal benefit accruing to the provincial government is such that after ten years adult basic education pays for itself, and every year thereafter the provincial government takes in/saves more money than it spends on the program.
Manitoba has a major poverty problem that has serious knock-on effects that everyone in Manitoba can see. Adult basic education reduces poverty by moving graduates into the paid labour force.
Manitoba has a large Indigenous population. Indigenous youth, on average, do less well in high school than non-Indigenous youth. But Indigenous people are coming back to finish high school as adults—they are represented in adult basic education at about two and a half times their share of the population. In this way adult basic education promotes reconciliation. As an adult educator in northern Manitoba said, “we are the boots on the ground for reconciliation.”
These are among the many benefits of a remarkably successful program. And the program is effectively cost free—in fact, it makes money for the provincial government in the form of reduced EIA payments and increased tax revenue.
Adult basic education is what an earlier study called a “buried treasure.” It transforms people’s lives—adults and their children—for the better. And it produces more economic benefits than it costs.
Why, then, doesn’t the provincial government dramatically increase the annual budgetary allocation for adult basic education?
Previously published in the Winnipeg Free Press December 24, 2025.
