Before reality intruded with a bunch of interesting stories from Ontario and New Brunswick, I was talking about the ways Canadian higher education is achieving less than it could: how the practice of our federal system condemns us to incoherence, how provincial governments are insufficiently focussed on results and how institutions don’t take internal quality assurance or improvement seriously.

But what to do about it?

First, we need to diagnose the problem correctly.  Clearly, this is not a problem with a single source: pretty much every part of the system shares some blame for the current state of affairs.  But there is a common element to the problem: namely, a go-along-to-get-along mindset that seems to be very widely shared across Canada (one might even call it a national trait).  If one wished to put a positive spin on that outlook, I suppose one might call it an “if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it” mindset, but this in itself is problematic.  Higher education isn’t a binary, where it is either “broken” or “excellent”: there are infinite gradations of quality and if the loftiest goal is to not be “broke” then we have a serious failure of ambition.

Second, there is a wide unwillingness to think systemically.  The feds want to do what they do to Science spending without thinking about the ecosystem as a whole.  The provinces want to spend money on institutions but never really say what outcomes they want from the system. Institutions, and in many cases faculty themselves, insist that teaching (in unregulated programs, anyway) is an inherently solitary activity and not a joined-up systems problem.  Hence, we have professors who jealously guard syllabi as individual intellectual property and refuse to let others teach “their” class, and institutions who insist on evaluating teaching on a per-class basis rather than holistically.  Program-level learning outcomes?  Those exist but are not even freely available within institutions (you should hear librarians kvetch about that one…) and God help anyone who suggests actually measuring outcomes. 

Go-along-to-get-along, everybody do their own thing, I’m OK, you’re OK.  It’s a weird case of a 1950s-sense of conformity enforcing a sense of 1970s permissiveness.  And no one wants to play the part of The Man and bring some order to all of this.  Because that would be a drag, daddy-o.

Now, to repeat again, just in case any one is inclined to take this whole series the wrong way: the issue is not whether Canada has a good higher education system or whether its professors on the whole do a good job.  It does, and they do.  But given how much we spend on the system, it could be a whole lot better.  We shovel money at problems when we should be thinking our way through them.  That we have been able to do this for the past decade has largely been down to the fact that we have been good at attracting fee-paying students from abroad while keeping provincial funding intact, at least in nominal terms.   

But there will come a day when this is no longer the case.  At some point, the increase in international students will cease.  At some point, we might need to measurably improve quality in order to charge higher fees to those international students (fees are high in ON and BC, but in most of the rest of the country they are very low by international standards). 

And we aren’t going to do that through the status quo that got us here in the first place.  It can only be done through co-operation, co-ordination and planning.  By acting like science is a national concern and not just a federal one.  By setting provincial goals and measuring progress towards them (and not hiding important operational data).  By acting as if learning is a function of planned, program outcomes, not uncoordinated acts of charismatic teaching.  

It means actually talking to one another instead of rushing off to do the next “big thing”. It means taking responsibility for achieving certain things with the dollars students and the public put into the system.  It’s a lot harder than what we do now, and no doubt there will be resistance to it, from all quarters, for all sorts of reasons.

But as a system, we’re never going to get better until we do these things.