I've raised this in other threads as well, but it's worth repeating: there are two basic drives behind migration: lifestyle and employment. Conventionally we think of migration as being driven by a search for employment, and lifestyle just emerges as a result of people settling some place. I think Calgarians traditionally maintain this mentality: it's all about the employment rate, average salary, and the health of a single industry. People will purchase their own desired lifestyle with the big bucks they make in oil and gas.
However, the increasingly dominant theory is the opposite: people move to cities based on lifestyle choices, and then they look for employment once they get there (and employment may be related to lifestyle in the sense that people want jobs they feel good about, as opposed to just being financially lucrative). This is more the model of Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. They all have traditionally had above average unemployment rates. Most of the young people moving there aren't pursuing jobs. They're often looking for any excuse to get there. More often than not, that excuse is post-secondary education. In fact, lifestyle-driven migration goes hand-in-hand with post-secondary education, since this is probably the most common moment in someone's life when they would be willing to move cities. Because universities in Canada are generally equal at the undergraduate level, lifestyle is a common driver of people's choices. And people's perception of lifestyle (especially in cities they've never lived in) depends a lot on the reputation of the city. Cities that are perceived as being more progressive have a distinct advantage of attracting young people.
Toronto didn't just become a lifestyle destination by accident. It was an explicit strategy on the part of the Provincial and Municipal governments, and involved (among other things) large investments in arts, culture, and education at the end of the 1990s and throughout the 2000s, as the city was emerging out of a prolonged recession. The investment in OCAD U is perfect example of this*.
The Alberta government doesn't have very much control over the oil boom and busts, but it does have money to invest in post-secondary education. Since moving for post-secondary education is such an important hinge point in people's lives, it seems the clear strategy here is to invest in making Alberta's universities/colleges more attractive, which includes improving the quality, affordability, and diversity of education in the province. A no-brainer to me is to make a massive investment in AUofA. Transform it from a dinky pseudo-university housed in a decaying, nondescript building on SAIT campus to the centre of a major hub within the inner-city, where there's room for spin-off uses to establish themselves. An project like this costs relatively little money: 10's of millions or, at most, low-100s of millions.
Investing in things like that will also help the stickier problem of dealing with Calgary's lousy reputation.
*Edit: it's worth noting that these investments were made by the very conservative Harris government in Ontario.