94 There is a palpable tension in contemporary post-secondary institutions about the purpose of higher education. As student debt soars, and as meagre meaningful entry-level employment opportunities plague university graduates, it is inevitable that the value of post-secondary education comes into ques- tion. This chapter uses British Columbia’s special purpose teaching universities as an example of institutional grappling with con- cerns of student employability and job pre- paredness. These special purpose institutions were colleges that became universities in recent years, with teaching greatly prioritized over research. There is a belief that their unique mandate for delivering student-cen- tered applied post-secondary education pro- grams will yield engaged citizens with job-ready skills that will help them swiftly plug in to careers. Many students choose the special purpose institution I teach at in British Columbia (BC) because of the con- nection to industry or community-based learning offered by many of the programs, and parents I meet at information nights or student showcases often seek alumni employ- ment stories, statistics and assurances. I am concerned about a neoliberal creep that rele- gates post-secondary education to the realm of capitalistic reproduction and negates the democratic and critical functions of higher education (Giroux, 2014; Sleeter, 2008). As an educator in media production, the realities of the neoliberal drive towards economic reproduction is particularly poignant as media production programs graduate stu- dents who are focused on working in the media industries during publicly troubled times. As the entertainment world struggles to address the issues in social media move- ments such as #metoo, #blacklivesmatter, #timesup or #idlenomore, it continues to reproduce culturally derisive and harmful mass media imagery and dominating hierar- chical industry processes. My concern is that under neoliberal pressure, media educa- tion ranging from film, to animation, journal- ism and corporate communications, can be Missing Beats: Critical Media Literacy Pedagogy in Post-secondary Media Production Programs Ki Wight BK-SAGE-STEINBERG_DOWN_V3-190309-Chp94.indd 1146 11/02/20 5:09 PM