A quick note: the OTTSYD will be on brief hiatus next week, as I’ll be in Japan and won’t have regular access to my computer. Not to worry, though, we’ll pick back up on the 18th.
Anyways: I was asked recently what I thought was the most important challenge for post-secondary education in Canada at the moment. Resisting (barely) the flip answer “money”, I eventually settled on the allied concept of “learning how to promote economic growth and prosperity”.
Now, I know this theme is anathema to many in universities, who prefer to think of institutions as places to promote the pursuit of truth, beauty, etc. Without wishing to dispute the importance of these goals, the pursuit of economic growth is simply a matter of self-interest. Universities and colleges are not getting more money from tuition any time soon, largely because the perception of costs has drifted a long way from the actual net costs. And as we saw earlier this week, there’s no new money coming from government this year, or any time in the near future. The culprits? A mix of adverse demographic trends and persistent slow economic growth.
Universities and colleges can’t do much about demographic change – they could be slightly less zealous about condom distribution during O-week, I suppose, but the pay-off is pretty long-term – but they can probably do something about economic growth. In theory, PSE institutions can help themselves by working-out how to catalyze prosperity. The problem is that universities, in particular, may not actually want to make the necessary changes to make this happen.
Let’s start by agreeing that we don’t actually know what specific higher education policies would maximize prosperity. There’s this assumption that whatever we do now must be improving things, so let’s just continue on with only incremental changes. But we actually have no idea if we’re teaching the right mix of skills, or competencies, or degrees to maximize growth. We don’t know whether institutions can do more for growth by focusing on a few highly-qualified personnel (mostly PhDs), or by providing better education to a mass of students unlikely to go past the Bachelor’s level. We don’t know what amount or types of experiential learning might be optimal. And while obviously it would be better all around if we understood these things, one still has to ask the question: if we knew the answer, would our institutions actually change as a result? Or would internal resistance to things like more co-op, or a greater focus on undergraduate education (or whatever) stop them from doing the “right” thing?
It’s a similar case with research. Say we had a better idea about how different types of research impacted short-, medium- and long-term growth, and we could say with some precision that re-jigging the system to be more/less focused on basic research, or more less/focused on (say) Life Sciences would likely result in larger economic payouts. We don’t have any such idea of course – you’d think someone would have cracked some of this by now, but they haven’t – but if they had, would anyone whose research specialty/style not among the “correct” categories voluntarily change their research programs to help promote economic prosperity? My guess is they’d sooner spend a lot of time contesting the economic research.
So there’s a choice here for institutions: continue doing what they are doing and worry about declining resources, or change things up to focus more on economic dynamism, and reaping rewards of higher income? This is a discussion worth having sooner rather than later.
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Thanks, Alex, for highlighting this issue – I think it links to the last post on Performance-based Funding, as this ‘Third Mission’ beyond education and research (understood as ‘advancing the general body of knowledge’). The Third Mission discussions in Europe might help to illuminate our considerations in Canada. Good starting points include these:
Jaeger, Angelika, and Johannes Kopper. “Third mission potential in higher education: measuring the regional focus of different types of Higher Education Institutions.” Review of Regional Research 34.2 (2014): 95-118.
“Fostering and Measuring ´Third Mission´in Higher Education Institutions”. the final report from the European project on Indicators and Ranking Methodology for University Third Mission (2012), http://www.e3mproject.eu/docs/Green%20paper-p.pdf
Montesinos, Patricio, et al. “Third mission ranking for world class universities: Beyond teaching and research.” Higher Education in Europe 33.2-3 (2008): 259-271.
“would anyone whose research specialty/style not among the “correct” categories voluntarily change their research programs to help promote economic prosperity?”
Of course they wouldn’t. To do so would be to participate in the reduction of universities into Soviet-style research academies, centrally controlled and basically useless for anything, including the promotion of economic growth.
In fact, universities promote economic growth most when they don’t try: if they don’t have an imperative to teach (say) entrepreneurialism, then they can make their students do lots of reading and produce the strong critical thinkers who become great knowledge workers. If they don’t have a need to develop lucrative doo-hickeys, they can release their findings into the public domain, where their findings can do more good. If they don’t engage in advocacy, they maintain their claims of neutrality and are more widely respected. And so on.
There’s one thing that’s been troubling me about this ongoing ‘debate’ that we insist on having about what universities should be doing. I wonder whether it’s really true that those of us who engage in the debate really can’t hold two or more thoughts in our mind at more or less the same time. The institutions we’re talking about are ‘universities’, and I’m betting that we can almost all agree that these institutions have evolved to include many different kinds of education. We teach ‘drama’, for example, usually in our English departments, and I’ll venture to say that this is a remarkably disconnected to the ‘economic growth imperative’ because there’s not all that much economic advantage in learning about pre-Shakespearean drama, for example. But, we also teach ‘theatre’, something completely different (though clearly closely related), which is often much more about educating students in the theatre arts and training them to be proficient in theatre skills–linking them quite directly to the entertainment industry where many of them will be earning their livings and then paying taxes.
I probably have my head stuck in the sands of a previous century, but I can’t help but think it bizarre that we should try to agree that the university of the future is any one thing–except, as it’s name implies, one conglomeration of many things. We already educate teachers and doctors and engineers and lawyers and dentists and nurses and scientists and business people and architects and practitioners in such niche professions as ‘disaster and emergency management’.
Is it really true that our society can no longer afford to spend some relatively small amount of our time and some relatively small amount of our energy and resources on philosophy and literature? It seems like such a very small thing to ask.
Peter Dueck