Category Archives: Uncategorized

May 03

The End of CREPUQ and its Implications

So, the Conseil des Recteurs et Principaux des Universites du Quebec (CREPUQ) died this week, after the number of institutions pulling-out of the alliance rose to eleven.

The basics of the dispute are simple. The big research universities are starving for cash; they’d prefer to get it from tuition fees if they can (students are a more dependable source of income than flighty governments), but they’ll take it via the funding formula if they have to. From the Laval/Montreal perspective: not only did the UQs shaft research universities on tuition by not backing the Charest plan, but now they’re screwing them on the funding formula by cozying up to a PQ plan that rewards institutions based on contributions to access, rather than research. So instead of “so-so-so… solidarité”, it’s “so-so-so… so long, and don’t let the door hit your behind on the way out”.

I’m sure Pauline Marois and Pierre Duchesne couldn’t possibly be happier.

In Quebec, the main consequence will be that certain elements of the HE quality assurance process, which universities – via CREPUQ – used to manage themselves, will now end up in government hands. But the impact of this implosion outside Quebec is worth watching, too.

At the federal level, we’re at ease with the idea that colleges and universities can have overlapping memberships: ACCC has been joined by Polytechnics Canada, and AUCC now shares the higher education field with the U-15, the Association of Canadian Comprehensive Research Universities (ACCRU), and, just this week, the U-4. But representation by separate, non-overlapping agencies hasn’t happened yet.

But now the precedent has been set, both in Quebec and in British Columbia, where the research universities and the rest have had different representation since forever. As dollars become scarcer and institutions become more concerned with their own slice of the pie, and less with the health of the sector as a whole, could we see the same thing happen in Toronto, or federally?

COU probably isn’t in trouble. A benefit of having largely ignored calls for differentiation from Ian Clark and Harvey Weingarten is that the university sector sees itself as having a fairly common set of interests (increased graduate students for all!). Federally, it’s a different story. Already, there are a number of institutional heads who prefer investing their personal time and energy in U-15 issues rather than AUCC: it may just be a matter of time before a couple of them decide their financial investment should be similarly focused.

If it happens, the instigator will be from Quebec or Alberta. Bank on it.

April 17

An Avalanche of Nonsense

I wasn’t going to write about the ludicrous new higher education paper, released last month by the UK Institute for Public Policy Research, entitled, An Avalanche is Coming; I didn’t think it had enough exposure to warrant it. But, since the Globe has now seen fit to publish an extract, I can go whole hog.

It starts off with bog-standard, “sky-is-falling” stuff: the global economy is a mess (true, but presumably temporary), the cost of higher education is increasing faster than inflation (true since the beginning of time), the value of a degree is falling (in most countries it hasn’t), and “competition is heating up” (MOOCs, basically). Somehow, these weak propositions add up to the argument that, massive change is inevitable.

The paper goes on to posit that the modern university is essentially a bundling of ten different “features” (in actuality, a weird amalgam of inputs, throughputs, and outputs), to wit: research, degrees, city prosperity, faculty, students, governance/administration, curriculum, teaching & learning, assessment and (student) experience. The impending “avalanche” will occur because technology and economics are permitting some unbundling of these services, and because in each of those ten areas, universities – allegedly – face growing competition.

For instance, the paper claims that universities’ dominance in research is being challenged by “think tanks” (hilarious – I await the Fraser Institute’s next paper on the Higgs Boson); it also claims – seriously – that the student experience is being challenged because it can be replicated by “meet-ups, youth clubs, and learning communities”. As for the rest, it’s all basically MOOCs, MOOCs, MOOCs – they’re going to change everything, don’t you know!

There is this fantasy out there – shared by silicon valley types and big money consultants, alike – that just because unbundling can happen that it will happen. Sure, it happened in the music industry – but that’s not a universal experience. It hasn’t been the case, for instance, in the real estate industry – mostly because the idea of going DIY on the biggest financial decision of your life scares the bejesus out of most people. And if you asked me whether higher education is closer in nature to music or housing, my answer would be pretty obvious.

I urge people to read the paper in order to get a sense of just how unhinged the higher education’s self-styled “revolutionaries” can actually get. Though the paper ends with some sensible points about the need for institutions to sharpen their value propositions, these recommendations in no way flow organically from the wholly evidence-free view that student demand is collapsing in the face of MOOCs. The notion this paper peddles – that positive change requires massive disruption – isn’t just wrong; it’s dangerous. It needs to be countered.

February 13

If University Presidents had a Union

It occurred to me while writing that last piece about salary comparisons: what if University Presidents used the same set of arguments about salary that professors do? What if we set their salaries as a function of what a comparator set of institutions were paying?

For this exercise, I have compared the presidential salaries at each of the top eight Canadian institutions in the Shanghai Academic Rankings of World Universities to those at the nearest comparator institutions among public universities in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia (for institutions outside the Top 100, where universities are grouped into bands of 50 or 100, I chose the “adjacent” institution by overall publication output). The resultant comparators are shown below.

Canadian Universities and Closest Comparators in ARWU Rankings

I took data for Presidential salaries from a variety of sources. For Canada, the data is from the ever-useful CAUT Almanac, except for l’Université de Montréal, which is from here. These don’t yield perfect comparisons; one notable issue is that Alberta reports total compensation rather than salary, which makes Indira Samarasekara’s compensation look significantly higher than her comparators, for whom only data on salary is provided. For the US, the data is from the Chronicle of Higher Education (via Berkeley to avoid the annoying paywall). UK data is from the Times Higher Education Supplement, and Australian data is from The Australian. Data for Australia and the UK are 2010-11, for the US it’s from 2009-10, and Canadian data comes from the 2010 calendar. Currencies have been converted to Canadian dollars using the 2011 Big Mac Index. The results are shown in the figure below.

Figure 1: Salaries of Canadian University Presidents and Close Foreign Comparators

Here’s what we learn from Figure 1:

1) Man, oh man, oh man, being a Vice-chancellor in Australia is a sweet deal. Remember a few weeks ago when I asked why no Canadian institution had hired an Australian? Apparently the answer is, “we can’t afford them”.

2) There isn’t a straight line between university status and CEO pay in any country. It’s never the top school that pays its President the most.

3) In four of these comparisons, the Canadian President is the worst-paid among the comparators; in the other four, they’re the second-worst. This is somewhat different than the situation among full-time academic staff, where the wage gap tends to go in.

To be clear: I’m not suggesting our Presidents could use a raise. I’m simply pointing out that if Presidents used the same kind of arguments that faculty unions use to demand wage hikes, the data above could certainly be used to make a very persuasive case. Sauce for the goose, and all.

Maybe “what the guy down the road earns” isn’t the be-all-and-end-all for salary comparisons. Maybe we need some better benchmarks.

January 10

A Country that Actually Does International Education

Countries interested in international education basically move through three phases. International Education 1.0 is about moving people from one spot to another – usually from a southern country to a northern one: it’s old-style, clunky, and by necessity a minority pursuit. International Education 2.0 flips this around and gets the institutions to bring the education to students in other countries, either via online education, branch campuses, or by curriculum licensing arrangements in other countries.

(There’s an International Education 3.0, too – one which involves institutions in different countries actually merging some parts of their operations to become a genuine, multi-national single-entity. I don’t think we’re quite there yet, but as I said last year, it could be on its way relatively soon.)

The margins on “1.0 students” can be pretty significant – which, of course, is why it’s tempting to stick with them. The margins on “2.0 students” tend to be a lot smaller, but, in general, you can attract a heck of a lot more customers if you don’t require them to pick up and move halfway across the globe in order to consume your product. And that’s the thing about countries that really do international education: they go where the customers are.

So, do Canadian institutions do this? At most institutions, it usually doesn’t amount to much more than teaching a few extension courses, or professional programs in Africa, or (if you’ve got an MBA program) some joint programming with an institution in Europe or Asia. There are some exceptions: Calgary and CONA have campuses in Doha. Waterloo had one in the Gulf, but that crashed and burned this fall (memo to Waterloo: publishing the post-mortem would be a favour to everyone). UNB, with campuses in Egypt and the Caribbean, is the leader in this field, but even there the total number of foreign students barely runs into the thousands. Meanwhile, almost nobody has really got into the business of licensing courses, which is where the real numbers are.

Compare this to the UK for a moment. Last year, UK institutions taught over 920,000 international students. Of these, only 46% were actually studying inside the UK itself; the rest were outside the country, the majority of which (291,000 in total) were not even registered at UK institutions but rather were at “overseas partner institutions,” delivering programming leading to the award of a UK degree.

Distribution of UK International Students

So, if that’s what it looks like for a country to be serious about international education, how does Canada compare? I’d show you if I could, but apart from students who actually show up here to go to school, no one even counts the numbers for Canada. And this, in some ways, probably tells you more about our efforts than any actual statistics ever could.

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.

November 13

Henry David Thoreau on Need Assessment

Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify, simplify! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail.

Canada’s system of student aid need assessment is much too complicated. Not only do we have a ludicrous number of different tax rates, but we have all sorts of weird little measures to engineer micro-equity between students. The result is a complicated system that can’t be explained to students.

How bad is it? Bad enough that some provinces don’t even bother explaining to students on their notices of assessment how they come up with the final figure. It’s not difficult: there’s a cost number, a resource number and a need number which is equal to the costs minus resources. But some governments got weary of explaining how they came to these figures (or why aid didn’t equal need if the latter was above the weekly-maximum).

This is awful for a couple of reasons. The first is that it’s a terrible lesson in civics. At least with tax forms, filling them in gives you an understand of why you have to pay as much as you do. Student loans are just a big black box: governments ask for personal financial information and then spit out an aid number without explaining how they got there. Student aid is the first contact most young people have with a government program and all the opacity doesn’t do the cause of active government any favours.

But the more important reason is that the lack of clarity makes it difficult for students to understand their eligibility for aid (the fact that they aren’t allowed to apply until after they’ve already made their choice of institution is an additional bad idea). Given how much we hector students about financial literacy and preparation, governments’ inability to reciprocate by providing more clarity around potential aid is a bit problematic.

These problems are extremely easily solved. Just reduce student aid to two factors: family income (parents plus kids), and tuition. That way, you could just give students a simple grid; income on one axis, tuition on the other, and voila! Need assessment so simple it would fit on a postcard. For completeness, you’d probably want one such grid for each student category (dependent at home, independent away from home, etc), but the outcome is the same – no-fuss, easy-to-communicate student aid.

Some students would undoubtedly get less under this system (some might also get more)– but what we’d lose from rough justice, we’d gain in program transparency and clarity. That’s a good deal, though: simplifying student aid will make it more understandable to precisely those on-the-margin students we most want to help.

November 09

Modularization vs. Learning Outcomes

If you’ve been near education conferences in the last year or so, the chances are that you’ve heard at least one of the two following propositions.

1) “Modularization is the Future”. People don’t need full degrees, they need knowledge in bite-size chunks, and they need it “on-demand”. That means that learning needs to come in tiny little bits, and certification for learning needs to come in tiny, bite-size pieces, too. This is partly what’s pushing the enthusiasm behind certain MOOCs and ideas like “Open badges”, but even within mainstream institutions, you’re seeing this as well. In the US, parts of the Michigan community college system are giving out “micro-credits” for as little as a two hours worth of classes.

2) “Learning Outcomes are the Future”. Part of the general movement for accountability in higher education is going to require institutions to describe expected student outcomes and figure out ways to credibly certify that students who have passed a given course of studies have in fact mastered the competencies and skills linked to those outcomes.

There’s something to both of these propositions. The problem is, they can’t both be right, because they contradict each other in one very fundamental way.

The whole point of the learning outcomes is to allow institutions to certify with some degree of precision what kind of knowledge and skills a person who has finished a particular program of studies has. That logic necessarily leads program design away from the frequently smorgasboard-buffet approach to course selection which is prevalent in arts and sciences in North America, and towards program with larger core curricula.

Basically, the more “core” courses there are, the more curriculum planners can be sure that particular skills and knowledge are being taught (and, presumably, learned as well). If learning outcomes are difficult to ensure with smorgasboard curriculum, they’re well-nigh impossible with a fully modularized one. The point of the modularization agenda is very much about making the credentials easier to obtain, and the explicit trade-off made is the coherence of the degree being offered.

To put this another way: the learning outcomes agenda is based on a human capital vision of higher education; the modularization agenda is very much about credentialism. The public policy rationale is probably stronger for the former, but there’s clearly a strong market rationale for the latter. Both are important, neither will trump the other.

Anyone who says either “the future is learning outcomes” or “the future is modularization” without offering any qualifications should be ignored. Different institutions with different missions serving different populations are – quite appropriately – going to favour different strategies. Grown-up, pluralistic education systems are capable of having trends moving in several directions at once.

November 07

Spousal Income

Over the past decade, successive Canadian governments have tried to give bigger and bigger breaks to parents through the student aid system. Loan eligibility has steadily been widened to richer and richer families by making expected parental contributions less onerous. But for some reason, no recent government has seen fit to change spousal contribution rates. Since the mid-1990s, this rate has been set at 80% of the spouse’s combined net income over a threshold which varies a bit by province but which in practice is about $13,000 per year.

Implicitly, the policy assumes both partners are students (in which case why not just treat their two applications as individual independent students?). But if the couple has one student and one non-student, the implications are mind-bogglingly punitive. Essentially, as soon as the non-student earns anything over about $35,000 per year, the expected contribution jumps so high that it is impossible for his/her spouse to get a loan. At any given level of family income a spouse is expected to contribute $15,000 more to a student’s education than a parent would.

Thanks to this policy, families with one spouse in school and one spouse working face an effective tax rate (that is, taxes paid plus reductions in benefits) of…drum roll, please…over 90%. And that’s only if the working spouse is debt-free. If they are repaying their student loan as well, the income phase-out on Repayment Assistance means that the effective tax rate on spousal incomes rises to well over 100%. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more text-book example of a welfare wall – the disincentives to work are just phenomenal.

I could go on, but I’ll spare you the gory details (though for more deets, you can check out I Love You Brad, But You Reduce My Student Loan Eligibility which is a few years old but still basically correct). It’s just a clumsy set of rules written twenty years ago when pinching pennies regularly trumped good policy-making. But bureaucratic inertia has left this clunker on the books for too long. It’s terrible policy, which no one in government can defend with a straight face. It’s not just inequitable; it creates a serious barrier to mature students (many of whom are married) returning to school.

Married students don’t have their own organized interest group and for some reason, this isn’t a cause student unions have seen fit to take up on their behalf. But if, like me, you think this needs changing, just forward this email to diane.finley at parl.gc.ca and let her know this mistake needs fixing.

Let’s see what happens.

November 05

African Higher Education – What Should Be On Everyone’s Radar

Here are the basic things you need to know about Africa as a higher education market:

1) It has a fast-growing population, with lots of young people to be educated.

2) Large bits of it – mostly the English and Portuguese bits, less so the French-speaking ones – are getting rich off the commodity boom. Ghana, in particular, is going gangbusters right now. This means higher education is now much more affordable than it used to be.

3) However, the demand for higher education vastly outstrips the ability of governments to pay for higher education (in part because public universities keep getting more expensive as professors demand their share of the commodity boom via higher wages). As a result, over the last decade hundreds of private universities have opened in Africa to cater to students who can’t get into one of the “prestige” public universities such as Kampala’s Makerere University or Accra’s University of Ghana.

4) There’s a really big demand for graduate education – and virtually everyone wants to go abroad for it, what with the state of graduate education on the continent being as dire as it is. The US and the UK are obviously top choices, but Canada – if we ever bothered to show up and promote ourselves – would be a good second choice in most of Anglophone Africa (we’re already there in francophone Africa, albeit against lesser competition).

5) But the demand for foreign education doesn’t mean cost is unimportant. In East Africa the most common foreign destination for education is Malaysia, where English and Australian universities have branch campuses. The reason? Quick degrees and low cost of living.

6) Regional integration is going gangbusters. Travel between countries in West Africa is commonplace, and there is now also common West African school leaving exams, which simplifies admissions from the region. Similarly, the countries that used to form British East Africa (Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania) are integrating quickly, and attracting other partners (e.g. Rwanda) as well. These, too, are becoming a common higher education area.

7) A number of countries allow foreign providers to establish campuses, though in some cases they might require a local partner. There are excellent opportunities for foreign institutions to set up and serve not only the country in which the institution is based, but also neighbouring countries, particularly where mobility is already high.

Small investments in Africa now could pay off very big in the future. Yet right now, Canada badly lags the US in setting up partnerships on the continent. It would be worth someone’s while to change that.

November 01

Non-solutions in search of a problem

I thought the Globe’s recent Our Time to Lead series was pretty good. The high point, pretty obviously, was Erin Anderssen’s kick-off piece and the low-point, equally obviously, was Don Tapscott’s context-free piece of techno-fetishist weirdness. On the whole, it was a good sign for what seems to be an increase in coverage on educational issues. However, I do feel the Globe slipped a bit with its very final article; namely, a policy prescription for a “national strategy” for students.

I don’t want to get too down on the Globe specifically because I think this “national strategy” language is pretty hard-wired into English Canadians and I think the Globe was just trying to speak to that audience in a language they understood. The problem is the thinking itself, which is much more widespread and problematic.

For reasons which escape me, large numbers of Canadians outside Quebec are under the seriously mistaken impression that the federal government is the “senior” (i.e. more important) level of government in Canada, and that any problem which is important should therefore be handled at that level. (For a reality check, do read Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s 1957 essay “Grants to Quebec Universities”, in Federalism and the French Canadians which thoroughly and amusingly demolishes this argument.)

But when you look at the actual arguments in favour of a “national strategy”, they don’t add up to anything like a case for federal or even pan-Canadian action. Take that Globe article, for instance. The alleged rationales for a “national” solution are:

A need for a better mix of theoretical and practical education
A need for a national accreditation system
A need for more credit transfer across provincial boundaries
A need for a universities to be less stuffy about accepting college credit for transfer
A need to nudge more students into high-demand fields (à la Florida)

Personally, I have my doubts that all of these are actually problems, but let’s take it for granted for the moment that they are and that they require a response. What exactly, is the advantage to having a national strategy over a series of provincial strategies? Would BC institutions be better off if their programs were accredited in Ottawa rather than Victoria? Would SIAST students benefit if the locus of credit transfer policy moved from Regina to Gatineau?

“National” policy making would be slower if it involved inter-governmental negotiations and of significantly lower quality if it were done unilaterally by Ottawa. If you want policy to be speedy and fit-for-purpose, it needs to stay where it is. In Canada, “national strategies” for higher education are a solution looking for a problem.

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Higher Education Strategy Associates