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A mere 55 per cent of available spaces will be allocated on the basis of merit alone. Like LP-of-the-month clubs and toe socks, relying on effort and high marks to become a teacher is now embarrassingly out-of-date.

The new quotas are, quite obviously, arbitrary and unfair. And given a 2014 report from the Council of Ministers of Education that found Manitoba’s test scores on math, science and reading to be the lowest in the country, putting greater emphasis on identify over ability when selecting potential new teachers seems unlikely to make things better. Manitoba, by the way, also boasts Canada’s most expensive teachers.

The school loudly proclaims it’s not running a quota system: every student must still meet minimum entrance standards (a C+ average). And if any particular diversity category goes unfilled, those spaces are to be offered to other groups within the overall non-quota, rather than opened up to merit-based applicants. Candidates can also self-identify in as many categories as they wish.

But if the overall goal, as the University of Manitoba states, is to ensure future crops of teachers “reflect the diversity of the communities we serve,” it seems the school has somehow overlooked another category of student who are grossly under-represented as teachers.

As is common at teachers’ college across the country, there’s a distinct lack of men at the University of Manitoba. Enrollment in the faculty of education is 72 per cent female, and has been that way for decades. Across the country, 75 per cent of all education degrees are earned by women. If teachers’ colleges are meant to mirror society, it can’t be overlooked that half the population is male, especially given the well-established importance of male role models in combating high drop-out rates among boys. China is now aggressively recruiting male teachers, according to a recent New York Times report, in order to “salvage masculinity in schools” and improve the consistently poor performance of boys in college entrance exams.