Earlier this week the Manitoba Government released a report that I and my colleague Yves Pelletier worked on for most of last year, the Manitoba College Review (you can read the report here). It was a challenging assignment, but I am very grateful to the many people to everyone who spent time with us and contributed to the report, and to all the alumni who answered our survey. In terms of system governance, we made some fairly sweeping recommendations, ones that give government more responsibility to articulate and measure quality outcomes and give institutions more operational freedom in order to meet those goals. I’ve been pleased to see how government has embraced these recommendations and I look forward to the results over the next few years.
I’m not going to re-hash the report here, but I did want to talk two issues that came up in the report which I think matter right across the country: providing post-secondary education in rural and remote communities, and the modernity of training facilities.
The Challenge of Provision in Rural and Remote Communities
Canada is a big country. And while we are also a highly urbanized country, the fact remains that there are large swathes of the country which do not have ready access to a post-secondary education institution (which I will define roughly as “having a college within a one hour drive”). This degree of severity of this problem varies a bit in different parts of the country depending on geography; it’s particularly acute in the North and in Northern Ontario but every province has the problem to some degree. But everywhere, the gap in educational attainment between rural and urban areas is wide and if rural Canada is not to be further left behind economically then there need to be ways to get education into those communities.
One iron law in education is that small classes are expensive to provide, and so the less dense a population, the fewer the potential students and the harder it is to provide services. The trick is working out what the minimum urban population is that can support an actual college (answer: probably around 15,000), and then how to provide services in communities smaller than that. Technology often gets trotted out as an answer (the internet! MOOCs!) but if there’s one thing that recent experience has shown it is that internet really works best for people who already have high levels of education. Electronic resources can’t hurt, but at a certain level it’s hard to replace human contact.
But the solution can’t just be to build training facilities in smaller and smaller communities. It’s simply too expensive and doesn’t produce results. Local politicians always push this solution because they like the spin-off dollars new construction brings and they like the idea of government activity paying for a few instructors (read: new residents with stable middle-incomes) to live in or near their towns. But for communities of below about 5,000 people even these facilities are ruinously expensive. Rather, it’s a matter of having a) a very good handle on local training needs, which most communities can’t articulate and b) a way of having colleges rotate similar kinds of programming through a variety of communities over a period of time. In some cases, First Nations communities have an advantage over mainstream communities in this respect because they sometimes have full-time education co-ordinators who can think about it and dedicated (if not always consistent) streams of cash from Ottawa to pay for training. Small mainstream communities usually can’t pay for co-ordinators like that, but provincial governments can do a better job of a) helping small communities get a handle on those needs and b) finding ways to ensure that larger colleges are paid to deliver this training as needed. Saskatchewan’s Regional College system is one example of an approach to this: it won’t work everywhere, but it’s the kind of approach that’s needed.
More definitive answers to this question are desperately needed. If anyone wants a “Big Challenge” in Canadian post-secondary education, I’d say this is it.
Training Facilities
One of the most interesting findings from my conversations with employers over the course of the review was how they thought about working with colleges in applied research and similar areas. Pretty consistently, they said that they enjoyed working with colleges on applied research projects but that they wouldn’t do so without federal money attached (for what it’s worth, friends at NSERC say their surveys of businesses reveal they say the same about partnerships with universities). But what they love – and I mean absolutely love – are when colleges create facilities which can be used to engage in applied research and to train new students and can also be used for training their own staff (the big example in Manitoba is Red River College’s Stevenson Campus which is a space for major partnerships with Boeing and Bristol Aerospace)
Having facilities to do applied research with students means having up-to-date equipment and training space. Businesses like having students work on this equipment to help solve their third- or fourth-tier business problems mainly because they help them identify which students are the most promising. But they like the equipment itself because it gives them the opportunity to do their own internal training and business process experimentation as well. And since most college facilities aren’t in use full-time, there is a lot of opportunity to share space.
The problem is that if there is one thing provincial governments tend to be bad at it is providing adequate and regular provisions for capital at community colleges. Increasingly, provinces are leaving capital to the feds, who – because they identify “innovation” with shiny technology rather than with skills and business processes – generally prefer to give money to new university science/tech buildings than to these kind of dual-use applied research/training facilities.
But in fact, these kinds of facilities provide solutions to all kinds of problems. Better quality training? Check. Increased workplace productivity? Check. Improving adult skills? Better job matches? Check. General collaboration and innovation in SMEs? Double-check.
I am usually critical of the federal government’s predilection for spending on infrastructure ahead of spending on programs in post-secondary. But this is an area where we are generally underinvesting, to the detriment of the quality of education and national productivity. If the feds want a new idea to ride into the next election, spending on dual-sue applied research/training infrastructure which can be co-used by colleges/polytechnics and businesses would do more good for broad-based economic growth than five superclusters combined.
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A few mechanisms are already in place to help address the types of benefits/solutions derived from dual-use applied research/training facilities you identify above:
Tech-access Canada: http://tech-access.ca/en/about/
The CFI’s College-Industry Innovation Fund: https://www.innovation.ca/awards/college-industry-innovation-fund
Granted most of these federally-funded facilities are in larger urban centres, but there are many examples n smaller rural settings. The Province of Quebec’s Centres collégiaux de transfert technologique have long been the “gold standard” on this front.
I would be remiss if I did not mention that CFI-funded applied research equipment and facilities in colleges, polytechnics and cégeps are, in almost all cases, co-funded by provincial governments.
One of the key recommendations of your report was that part of Government funding for these colleges should be tied to outcome measures, specifically program graduation rates.
I am very sure that you are aware of the variety of means are available, within Canadian colleges, for addressing the issue of program graduation rates. Three of the most common (as you know) are:
a) trying to identifying students most at risk of ‘drop out’ and targeting additional resources and support to this group.
b) lowering grading standards so that students who would previously have ‘failed’ (or, at least, had to repeat many courses) are passed.
c) establishing entrance procedures and requirements so that students who are likely to drop out are less likely to be admitted.
This last strategy is sometimes part of program ‘restructuring’. For example, a few years ago the nursing program at D***** College in BC was faced with an attrition problem that resulted in a smaller proportion of graduates than required for an expensive program. The solution was to reorganize the degree structure so that the classes with high failure rates such as Statistics and Human Biology were made part of a pre-nursing year. Only students who survived these courses with a C+ minimum were admitted to the nursing program which started after 30 ‘open enrolment’ credits. Graduation rates have risen substantially.
As your own data indicates, graduation rates have been rising in Colleges across Canada, including in Manitoba (although at a lower rate). As a hypothesis, I would suggest that b) and c) have been more responsible for this trend than a) (although I will concede that there have been some interesting examples of a).
If my hypothesis is correct, how will your proposals affect this (if adopted)? You suggest that quality control mechanisms such as DQAB in BC would help to control attempts to ‘game’ the system. But DQAB, and internal ‘quality control’ mechanisms have no real input on b) and, if anything, have encouraged more selectivity in program admissions.
1. Technically, the recommendation was to fund graduations, not graduation rates.
2. Community College in MB is open-access, something we suggested the govt insist on maintaining, in part because it would prevent the gaming you note.