With things in Ontario starting to calm down, Alberta is the next frontier in Canadian PSE changes.  The October budget asked institutions for some pretty significant mid-year adjustments, and if the already-published departmental business plan is anything to go by, it looks as though institutions are going to have to absorb several hundred million dollars more in cutbacks over the next couple of years.  How Alberta institutions react to this will be instructive, because they’ll be experiencing in fast-forward what pretty much every institution in Canada will experience once the current international student boom ends. 

But while it’s a place worth watching, it’s also badly misunderstood, in higher education as in everything else.  The province’s higher education system and its history are quite unlike anywhere else in Canada, and some of the specificities need to be grasped to put the current moment into context.  So today I am going to go over that history a bit, and tomorrow I’ll do a statistical review for the province.

All good?  Let’s start.

The first thing you need to understand about Alberta is the massively outsized space that the University of Alberta has historically occupied in the province.  Alberta was very quick to establish a university – it did so ahead of both Saskatchewan (which, prior to WWI, was considered the more dynamic of the two 1905 accession provinces) and British Columbia.  Not only that, but University of Alberta was arguably the first genuinely non-denominational public university in the country and certainly the first unabashedly set up to emulate the American land-grants with both a public service and research mission.  It was also meant to be at the centre of the university system – private colleges had to affiliate to it and a Calgary facility, once it eventually opened, was a U of A satellite until 1964 (amazingly, the city had no public higher education beyond a teacher training facility until 1951). In terms of its historical provincial position, U of A’s only real peer in Canada is UBC; arguably it has closer parallels with some western American flagship institutions than it does with Eastern Canadian universities.

The second thing to understand about Alberta is that between about 1960 and 1971, there was no more hyperactive jurisdiction when it came to higher education than Alberta.  In his old age, Ernest Manning became a huge backer of post-secondary education and so was his successor Harry Strom.  In the space of about ten years, they transformed Calgary from a satellite campus into am independent institution, oversaw a near-tripling of the University of Alberta’s student population, opened a university in Lethbridge, created a whole unique college system more or less from scratch, and dove deep into experimental forms of educational delivery by creating the University of Athabasca.  And this was all before the first oil boom. 

Some of this was done on the cheap, which is one of the reasons both U of A and U of C were, for most of the twentieth-century, leading candidates in the “Canada’s Worst Campus Architecture” competition (although HUB Mall was pretty cool provided you ignored the leaky glass ceiling).  But the result was nonetheless pretty spectacular.  It had a top-5 national university and a provincial system of research funding.  It also had a genuine system of community colleges (which included the country’s most extensive system of apprenticeship training) and a pretty well-regulated system of credit transfer between universities and colleges.  It had public board control of colleges, but still managed to balance that with government system-steering unheard of in eastern Canada.

(To this day, Alberta not only has the closest thing Canada has to a genuine system of education, but the government is also by some distance the most interventionist in the country when it comes to universities.  Quite unlike other provinces, ministers always feel quite free to pick up the phone to presidents and tell them what they are doing wrong in obscure corners of their business.)

The extent of government expenditure increases in this period were, as you can imagine, massive.  To some degree, though, it involved diverting funds from the University of Alberta, which is why these years are not always remembered fondly there.  The big jump in expenditure was mainly a public affair.  Quite by design, Alberta in this period had among the lowest tuition fees in Canada – at one point cheaper than Quebec, and this cheap tuition approach was maintained well into the 1990s.

Despite being the “progressive” alternative to the Social Credit governments it replaced, the Alberta Progressive Conservative Party was actually less interested in post-secondary affairs than its predecessor.  By anyone else’s standards, the 1970s and early 1980s were good years financially for the sector, but compared to other parts of the public service, PSE was no longer the favoured child.  And then, after Ralph Klein became premier, came the brutal cuts of the mid-90s, responding to what was by then a decade-long slump in the price of oil.  A 21% cut in government funding (spread over three years), was accompanied by a relaxation in tuition fee policy and these fees were allowed to rise to 20% – later 30% – of operating income.  This sounded like a lot at the time.

But what Klein took away, Klein – and especially his successor Ed Stelmach – put back once the deficit was eliminated and new gas revenues started to kick in.  In 2000, Albertan institutions were still considered moderately well-funded: by 2010, after a decade of having a firehose of money turned on the sector, the gap between Alberta and the rest of the country was massive.   Alberta’s colleges were easily the best-funded in the country, NAIT and SAIT were in many respects Canada’s most advanced technological institutes, and the two largest universities were busy raiding the rest of the country’s institutions (and some parts of the Western US as well) for talented staff.  At one point in 2009 the University of Alberta was probably host to more cranes per hectare than any other part of North America. 

But then came the last decade, shaped by a very gradual erosion of funding (most of which came on the capital expenditure side), capped in the last four years by a tuition freeze.  The province as a whole – not just post-secondary education – moved from a period of really quite outrageous ambition to one of managing a very slow decline.  The transition has not been fun, because the legacy of the early 2000s is that Alberta does have quite an expensive system of higher education which provides exceptional services, particularly in rural areas.  The question, as always, been whether Alberta wants to maintain its exceptionalism or simply become a “normal” province as far as PSE is concerned.  The new UCP government’s budget last month suggests the answer is the latter.