HESA

Higher Education Strategy Associates

January 08

Left Behind Again

One of the most interesting phenomenon in global higher education these days is a movement known as the Tuning Process.  And, surprise, surprise, Canada’s allegedly-globally-linked-in, ultra-internationalized universities are nowhere to be found.

The Tuning Process is a process of detailing learning outcomes at the program-of-study level – a mostly faculty-driven process to determine what students should know, and be able to do, by the end of their degree.  What distinguishes Tuning from the kind of learning outcomes process we see at Canadian universities, such as Guelph, is that the process of determining outcomes statements aren’t the responsibility of faculty members at a single institution; rather, they emerge from the collaborative effort of multiple institutions.

The original Tuning was designed to come up with Europe-wide outcomes statements in a few fields of study.  Since then, it has spread around the world: to Latin America, Russia, and Japan.  More recently, it has expanded to places such as China (where, to be honest, it seems hard to believe there was much practical difference in learning outcomes between institutions, anyway) and Africa (where the degree of faculty particularism makes it really hard to imagine this process taking off).  Globally, Tuning has been at the heart of the OECD’s AHELO project, which aims to compare general cognitive skills and specific subject knowledge.

But perhaps the biggest surprise is what’s happening in the United States.  There, the Lumina Foundation launched a Tuning project about three years ago with a number of US states (Indiana, Minnesota, Texas, and Utah) in a variety of subjects; more recently, they have attempted to do a Tuning process nationally, on a single subject area, through a partnership with the American Historical Association.

Tuning is a big deal.  Though institutional participation in Tuning is everywhere voluntary, the speed at which it is spreading around the world means that within a relatively short space of time degrees that are “tuned” (that is, come complete with widely accepted learning outcomes statements) will be the norm.  Once that’s the case, there will be implications for the ability of the “untuned” to attract students.  In professional programs, this isn’t a huge deal because accreditation serves more or less the same function.  But in other disciplines, while a few institutions are stepping up to the plate, we haven’t yet got to the point where we can have grown-up, national conversations about program outcomes.

We’ll pay for this, eventually, if we don’t board this train.  Someone needs to kick-start this discussion here in Canada.  But who?

January 07

Those Big, Bad, “American-style” Program Reviews

Hi everyone, and welcome back.

The best education story of the winter break was almost certainly the Globe piece on program reviews at Canadian universities.  Despite an inane headline (when it comes to a policy’s unsuitability, nothing unites Canadian bien-pensants more than claims to an American origin), it’s an important piece about a useful process occurring at universities across Canada.

HESA has directly contributed to two of these exercises (you can see some of our work, here), and with that experience I think there are a couple of points in the article which bear greater exposition.  In particular, while the idea of conducting program reviews has received recent impetus from the writings of Robert Dickeson, the idea that Canadian institutions have adopted Dickeson holus-bolus is simply not true.

Dickeson’s key insights – the ones that attract everyone to his book – are that spending decisions at universities should be informed by some kind of insight about the relative quality and efficiency of different programs, and, in turn, this requires the creation of an indicator set which allows like-to-like comparisons.  He also suggests a number of possible indicators, the specifics of which one can fiddle with as the local need requires.  So far, so good.

Dickeson’s work is a less useful guide, however, when it comes to the espousal of  Jack Welsh-style ranking –and-yanking.  In his system, every indicator gets weighted and scored, all scores are aggregated, and the worst-performing units are cut.  Conceivably, this approach makes sense at cash-strapped American state institutions where shared governance is less in evidence than it is in Canada – although I’d argue there are still better ways to use the data.  Up here, this approach would lead to a faculty revolt within minutes.

Another problem with Dickeson’s approach is his desire for data at the level of programs, rather than departments.  Most of the data he advocates for simply doesn’t exist at the program level in most institutions, and trying to deal with this issue can waste a lot of energy.  What would make more sense in Canada is to look at quality at the departmental level (which can be done relatively easily), and keep the program-level focus at the level of economics (i.e. how much money is being gained/lost by each program).

Taking a more rigorous approach to analyzing the academy won’t please everybody; there will always be those who say that the data can’t capture everything, or will whine about the need for an appeals process, or some such thing.  But bills have to be paid.  Decisions need to be taken.  And it’s better to make those decisions based on real data than on the squeaky-wheel basis that has historically predominated in Canadian universities.

December 21

Barking Up the Wrong Tree

I haven’t written about MOOCs in awhile, mostly because I’m finding the whole discussion pretty tedious.  They’re an interesting addition to the spectrum of continuing education offerings, and they’ll exist so long as venture capitalists and large, big-brand universities feel like subsidizing the hell out of them. Period.

The supposed “value” of MOOCs is that they deliver the same old lecture-driven process at a cheaper price.  But what should be our real priority right now: Making education cheaper, or finding ways to deliver greater value?

Imagine you’re in the early 1950s, and someone gives you the task of saving be-bop from the predations of rock and roll.  And suppose that same person hands you some piece of technology from 2012, which can deliver be-bop to the masses, at a cheaper price:  MP3s, live streaming shows, that kind of thing.  With this, you could make be-bop accessible at anytime, anywhere, and maybe even for free!  But Be-bop’s decline had nothing to do with being too expensive;  Buddy Holly was still going to kick its behind, because he had become the more relevant market choice.

In many ways, the same is true of education.  The fact that we can make the existing model of education cheaper doesn’t adress the issue of relevancy – focusing on cost when relevance is the key issue is misguided, and a distraction.

Undergraduate education has always been about preparing people for the labour market.  Back when it was a pursuit for people who either had hereditary wealth or were heading into guaranteed spots in the public service, we could pretend that higher education was about seeking Truth.  But if we’re honest, all those Truth-seekers ended up getting a pretty good financial return on their educational investments because their degree certified them as being significantly brighter than their non-degree-earning peers.

But when 70% of the youth population has some form of post-secondary education, that deal no longer works.  Having a degree no longer proves that you’re among the best and the brightest.  Graduates need something more.  And that “something more” is being a person who is engaged, effective and innovative.  When parents send their kids off to school, that’s really what their hoping their little ones will become.  Now this doesn’t mean that kids can’t study philosophy on the way to being engaged, effective, and innovative; it does, however, mean that PSE institutions need to think a lot harder about how to give students those skills.

It’s not rocket science.  Waterloo does it through its co-op programs.  Ryerson is doing it through its Digital Media Zone.  Polytechnics like NAIT who use applied research projects to drive curriculum are doing it, too.  Mostly, institutions are doing it by acknowledging the pedagogical value of interactions with the world of work, and opening themselves up to collaboration with businesses and government agencies to deliver it.  And its working.

Engaged, effective, and innovative students.  Let’s make it a watchword for 2013.

December 20

More Thoughts on Presidential Selections

A couple of points which I couldn’t quite jam into last week’s blog on University Presidents:

1) Where are the foreigners?   Why do we assume that only Canadians can run Canadian universities?  It’s fairly obvious from their actions that university Boards of Governors assume this.  And when we do want a “foreign” perspective, all we seem to do is repatriate Canadians (e.g.: Robert Birgenau at Toronto, Roseann Runte at Carleton, Doyle Anderson at FNU, etc.).

That’s a pretty poor showing for a set of institutions which claims pretensions to being world-class.  Granted, every institution has a local community to satisfy, but it’s not as though our universities are so peculiar as to be impenetrable to outsiders.  If central banking has become a sufficiently technocratic profession that someone can swap Ottawa for London with relatively little difficulty, why should university leadership be any different?   American universities aren’t shy about this: Runte’s passport didn’t cause a stir when she was at Old Dominion; even Oxford has appointed foreigners to the Vice-chancellorship (John Hood was a kiwi).

Forgive me for banging this drum again, but why exactly, if we want to be taken seriously in the internationalization department, are we not aggressively hiring foreign senior administrative staff who might actually give us a leg up in this area?  Why haven’t one or two universities poached an Australian or a Brit to run their operations?  They’d certainly have more experience than almost any domestic candidate in terms of running universities on a shoestring, and attracting foreign students.

It’s a mystery to me.

2) Are there better ways to choose Presidents?  A couple of people wrote to me last week to ask whether there wasn’t a better way to select Presidents than the current method – having a dozen people go into secret conclave with a headhunter and emerge 8 months later with a name.

In much of the world – including some Quebec institutions -  the model is a democratic one.  Put simply, faculty vote for their Presidents.  This tends to favour insiders (though Francois Tavenas was elected at Laval, while still employed at McGill), which isn’t always a good thing, since a lot of back-room deals can be made on the way to building a winning electoral coalition.  An in-between solution is to present a number of candidates to the university community in a town hall setting, prior to making a final decision.  It’s more open and democratic than the current system, but if you require job candidates to announce to the world that they’re open to leaving their present job, you deter a lot of good candidates who already hold important positions.

So, no, I’m not sure there is a better method to be honest.  Sorry.

December 19

Lessons from Quebec

What lessons can we learn from the current mess in Quebec?  I think two stand out – one for students, and one for universities.

The lesson for students is this: it’s great that they can mobilize and maintain pressure on government in the ways they have over the past twelve months.  But, if you fight a tuition fee hike by telling government that there’s oodles of waste and inefficiency in universities, don’t be surprised if they take you at your word, and slash budgets.

Now, frankly, the student associations are kind of screwed.  Can students once again take to the streets to confront this new issue?  Likely not – and the total silence emanating from “the usual suspects” regarding a new wave of protests suggests they know they can’t, either.  But if students don’t do something, they’ll be giving government the impression that they care more about price than quality.  And if this happens, the government really will have carte blanche to do more-or-less whatever it wants to institutional budgets.  So, you know, congratulations to students on beating the government at checkers; too bad there’s actually a chess match going on.

At the same time, the lesson for universities – in particular the government relations folks –is this: when a government goes out on a limb for you, you back them loudly and publicly.  Period.

Granted, the exiting Charest government was among the least palatable champions a university could wish for.  Worn-out, accident prone, and scandal-plagued (joke of the year candidate: “what’s the difference between a Quebec student leader and a Quebec mob boss?  The mob boss doesn’t need to forswear violence to get a meeting with the Minister”), there was almost no one less credible than the PLQ to carry the message about the need for greater investment in higher education.

But, Government Relations 101: “Ya dance with the one that brung ya.”  Whatever they thought about the Liberals, the Presidents should have backed the plan instead of leaving the PR to the Conseil des Recteurs et Principaux des Universites du Quebec  (which was terminally conflicted on the issue), or taking off on foreign trips at the height of the protest.  And not because it was a brilliant plan, either, but because failing to back a government when they do you right makes all political parties question your value as an ally.  The perception that universities are a constituency with little political loyalty almost certainly played some part in the PQ’s decision to pick a fight with them.

As Quebec universities regroup to fight this latest battle, it would be good for them to reflect on how they got in this situation in the first place, and perhaps acknowledge that they blew it last spring.

December 18

Baumol vs. Bowen

A fascinating paper came out recently on SSRN, which should be of interest to anyone concerned with the economics of higher education.  Its purpose was to answer a most interesting question: is cost-inflation in higher education driven by internal factors, or external ones?

There are two leading theories about cost-inflation in higher education.  The first, proposed by William Baumol (whose new book I mentioned last week), argues that external factors are to blame.  Education, as a labour-intensive good, says Baumol, will always see its costs rise at a faster-than-average rate in an economy where constant productivity gains are the norm.  Howard Bowen, on the other hand, suggests that the cause is internal: because virtually anything can be defended on the grounds that it increases “quality”, universities’ main impulse is to raise as much money as possible, and then spend it on a more-or-less infinite list of priorities.  This is what’s known as the “revenue theory” of college cost inflation.

These two concepts are not mutually exclusive, but they do lead to very different policy remedies for the problem of cost-inflation. It would therefore be a good thing if we understood the extent to which the Baumol and Bowen effects contributed to the overall phenomenon; what’s cool about this new paper, Measuring Baumol and Bowen Effects in Public Research Universities, by Robert Martin and R. Carter Hill, is that it manages to use empirical data from 143 research universities to confront this very question.

Martin and Hill’s conclusion is that, for the most part, the Bowen effect prevails.  For every $1 that the Baumol effect has raised costs, the Bowen effect has raised costs by $2.  They also note – in a finding that engendered some amused/outraged comments from the American professoriate – that the most cost-effective ratio of tenure-track professors to professional administrators (no, I couldn’t find a good definition of what that term means) is 3:1.

I’m not familiar enough with the IPEDS database to critique the paper comprehensively, but it seems to me that the analysis ignores any kind of output related to research, which has been a significant driver of increased costs over the years. And the observation that 3:1 is the “most efficient” ratio is just odd: expenditures can still bring positive returns even if they are not maximally efficient (Economics 100: profit maximizes where Marginal Cost = Marginal Revenue, not where Actual Cost is lowest).

One should also be careful about assuming these results would hold in Canada.  My initial impression is that growth in administration has been more restrained here than in the US.  But we’ll never know for sure. Sadly, Canada has no IPEDS equivalent which would allow us to look at non-Academic staff numbers over time.

December 17

The Beagles Have Landed

How do you run a business when profit is meaningless?

This is a key question confronting every university administration. Our PSE institutes are businesses – complex organizations which require enormous amounts of money, from diverse sources, in order to succeed. For many reasons, it is a blessing that they are not oriented towards profit. But without a clear bottom line, how do you actually know when to spend, and when not to spend? What replaces the discipline of the market, come budget time?

At one level, the answer is the same as it is for every other non-profit: priorities are governed partly by mission, and partly by the availability of funds. But universities’ mandates are unbelievably broad – almost limitless, actually. Take “meeting students’ needs”, which is a common enough mandate. What could that encompass? Better seating in the cafeteria? A new gym, or hockey arena? What about an international airport? Similarly, consider a university’s mission to, “advance the frontiers of knowledge”. Does that just entail upgrading computer labs, or could it also include, say, purchasing a space flight simulator? What about an actual space station?

Here’s the problem. The only bar universities set for themselves is “quality”, and virtually anything can be justified in the name of “quality”, so long as the money is available to pay for it. So if you give universities money – any amount of money at all – they will spend it, because they have no instinct to tell themselves not to. The polite term for this is, “the revenue theory of expenditures”. However, another way to think about this is to consider that universities – like beagles and hamsters –lack a brain mechanism that tells them to stop eating.

Basically, universities are good at growing, but terrible at shrinking. The answer to every problem is always “more”. If more comes from government, great. If it comes from alumni or business, great. If it comes from students, great. Universities are agnostic about sources of money, but fundamentalist about aggregate incomes.

But we seem to be entering a phase in which governments aren’t in a position to provide more money, and students and parents seem more reluctant than usual to pay or donate more. And if more revenue is out of the question, then diets are the order of the day. How will universities react? Nick Rowe has painted one particularly nasty, but plausible, scenario, which bears pondering. His specifics are a bit different than mine would be, but the basic point – that universities on a diet are incredibly difficult to manage – deserves a lot more attention that it currently receives.

University income has been flying upward for most of the last decade; when these beagles land, it will be with a heck of a thud.

December 14

Christmas Books

Holiday time means that you’re probably looking for gifts.  If you’re in the market for books related to higher education, I’ve got two recommendations for you.

The first is, The University: An Illustrated History.   It’s a coffee-table book, too unwieldy even for reading in bed, let alone on an airplane.  But who cares?  It’s as good a single-volume history of higher learning as has ever been written; it’s admirably global in scope, and it does a very nice job of balancing the institution’s long history (which, let’s face it, can get pretty tedious, especially in the later middle ages) with a series of short articles describing current tensions and policy issues.  The only slight niggle is that, for a global history, it probably pays too much attention to Spanish and Latin American universities, but that just reflects the fact that the editor (it’s actually a collection of essays rather than a single monograph) is from the University of Valladolid,  and the book was originally published in Spanish.

What’s special about this book, though, is its photos and illustrations. It’s nice to be reminded just how stunning, varied, and experimental campus architecture can be.  Quite lovely.

The second book isn’t about higher education, per se, but is nevertheless highly relevant: economist William J. Baumol’s, The Cost Disease: Why Computers get Cheaper and Health Care Doesn’t.  Baumol’s “cost disease” is simply the name for the phenomenon, first noted in the 1960s, of how labour-intensive goods (including higher education) get more expensive relative to capital-intensive goods, over time.  This is because when real wages rise in more productive fields of endeavor, they have to increase in less productive ones, too, otherwise everyone would leave and go elsewhere.  The result: rising costs over time.

Some people think this is a huge problem, and that the only solution is to automate education so as to stop it from taking over an enormous portion of the national budget.  Baumol himself is more sanguine.   Why worry about the cost of health and education when the cause of cost-inflation (i.e. cost decrease of capital-intensive goods) is also the solution (i.e. people will have more money left over to pay for more costly, labour-intensive goods)?  It’s a message that both governments and students, who complain about out-of-control costs, need to internalize.

Long term, the effect of having two parallel economies – one composed of “productive” sectors which generate cash but not many jobs, and “labour-intensive sectors”, which suck cash from elsewhere, but create jobs – has some important political ramifications that we haven’t yet absorbed.  My only criticism of Baumol is that he leaves this important issue unaddressed.

Joyeux Noel!

December 13

The Presidential Merry-Go-Round

It was noted recently that there are some big presidential vacancies looming, most notably at Toronto, McGill, Victoria, and Dalhousie.  So who’s going to get these plum jobs?

At Dalhousie, of course, we already know the answer: It’s Richard Florizone – formerly the VP Finance and Administration at the University of Saskatchewan, who also had stints at the International Finance Corporation (part of the World Bank), Bombardier, and the Boston Consulting Group.

This wasn’t Florizone’s first attempt at becoming a university President – why he wasn’t selected to succeed Peter McKinnon at Saskatchewan remains uncertain. One possibility is that the university wanted a change in style (not uncommon after a three-term presidency, no matter how good the President is – and McKinnon was one of the best); many considered Florizone too close to McKinnon, stylistically, to have a chance.  Another possibility is that the faculty felt his academic credentials weren’t strong enough; Florizone has a PhD in nuclear physics from MIT, but he preferred the private sector to the tenure track.  Nothing wrong with that, of course: Florizone’s definitely got all the skills to be an excellent university President.  But in the world of university leadership, his lack of professorial rank is a bit of an oddity.

What about the other three?  At UVic, after 13 years of David Turpin, the university might well favour an outsider (as was the case with Saskatchewan).  It could either pick up a President from a smaller university (Eddy Campbell and Ray Ivany would both be great choices, but my guess is that neither is available), or an up-and-coming Vice-President Academic (Carl Amrhein? Maureen Mancuso?).  Victoria’s one of the country’s more interesting universities, so there should be no shortage of strong candidates.

Toronto tends not to hire from other Canadian universities so an appointment from abroad is a strong possibility – which means it’s very hard to call.  At McGill, there’s going to be a real temptation to try to bring Stephen Toope home from UBC, which would then require filling a vacancy on the west coast.   Personally , I think you’d want to do a sanity check on anyone wanting to move from UBC to Quebec these days, but the hometown pull might be enough to sway Toope.  At the same time, Daniel Woolf is coming to the end of his term at Queen’s, so he might be in-frame, as well. Of course, David Turpin could also be a good choice, assuming he’s not royally sick of the whole administration thing by now (though if Woolf moves, Turpin would have to be top of Queen’s wishlist).

Want to impress people with your prognostication skills?  Leave your guesses for the Vic, McGill and Toronto presidencies in the comments section.

December 12

Islamic Student Loans

As-salaam Alaikum.

Every once in awhile, someone in the student movement hears tell of interest in Islam being prohibited, thinks about student loans for a microsecond, and then comes up with the idea that student loans are “unislamic” and, hence, culturally inappropriate.  This, in the past, has led some in Canada to claim that the whole student aid system needs to be revised and made more grant-reliant, all in the name of cultural sensitivity.

This is mostly bilge, for two reasons.

The first is that there are many ways to deal with the no-interest rule.  Normally, Islamic banking gets around the problem of interest by having the bank co-own an asset while the loan is being paid down (Islamic mortgages are essentially rent-to-own deals); but, that’s admittedly difficult for a student loan where there’s no hard asset against which to borrow.  But a Bai’muajjal, or credit-sale arrangement, is still possible: it’s simply a loan with a fixed installment plan at the end, which gives the lender a profit.   With a bit of tinkering, the US Government’s graduated repayment student loan scheme, as well as the Swedish student loan system, would both meet that test – especially since there is no profit involved.  Or, one could do as Malaysia’s student loan program does and simply replace “interest” with a “fee” that works exactly the same way as interest, but preserves the form (if not the spirit) of the Sharia.

The second reason is that many muslims simply don’t care whether or not a loan is Sharia-compliant.  My colleagues and I at HESA recently saw evidence of this during some work we did related to the introduction of student loans in Indonesia, the world’s largest Islamic country.  We asked 2000 students in various parts of the country if they would take a student loan were it offered to them.  Just over half said yes; of the remainder, 88% said that loans were a good idea for some students, but not for them personally.  The main reason that this group of students did not want a loan was because they did not need one.  About a quarter of all students expressed some unease about student borrowing (though the percentage who specifically mentioned Sharia as the reason was much, much smaller) – but even these students expressed little unease about borrowing, per se – and, interestingly, three quarters of those who expressed unease about student loans had no problems with the idea of a mortgage.

Though it is theoretically be possible to create Sharia-compliant student loans, the market for them is tiny, even in Islamic countries.  That’s not an argument against their being offered, but it is a reason to dismiss the notion that not offering them actually represents any kind of barrier to access.

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