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This article explores young men’s educational experiences and career trajectories in the context of restrained public expenditure, neoliberal educational policies, tightening job opportunities, and growing concern of the gender achievement gap. Based on focus group research among young postsecondary-educated students in Ontario, Canada, this article reveals how young men, in particular, emphasize the importance of passion and purpose in creating successful selves and in navigating higher education. The author examines research findings through a transdisciplinary lens that juxtaposes psychological research on passion, management perspectives on success, economic studies on gender and the labor market, and critical perspectives of gendered subjectivities within the context of a declining manufacturing sector and a rising service-led knowledge economy to explore and analyze how young men construct their learner subjectivities. As such, these narratives should be read as the product of risk-taking, heroic, and self-confident self-entrepreneurship that necessarily involves self-regulation, introspection, diligence, and responsibility.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Toronto Police Service was exploring how to increase access to higher education to its officers. The service saw higher education as salient to its organizational imperatives of professionalization, increased public legitimacy and credibility, and enhanced academic recognition of police professional learning. To realize this mission, the Toronto Police Service entered into a higher education partnership with the University of Guelph and Humber Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning under its then-new joint venture, the University of Guelph-Humber. The University of Guelph-Humber designed an accredited higher education pathway for Toronto Police personnel that also gave academic credit for past professional learning and increased educational access by offering blended course delivery. Based on semi-structured interviews with key educational administrators at the University of Guelph-Humber, Humber Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning, and the Toronto Police Service, this article narrates the origins of this higher education pathway—a Bachelor of Applied Arts in Justice Studies. In addition, it describes how this pathway evolved to include non-uniform Toronto police personnel, other police services, and expanded further to include learners from the larger justice and public safety fields. The exploration is situated in a larger discussion about the relationship between higher education, professionalization and legitimacy, and the potential of partnerships between higher educational  institutions and professions in Canada.

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