Blue Skies Ahead

Morning everyone. Today is the last blog for a few weeks (though there will be a podcast tomorrow and a Fifteen on Friday). Normal service will resume on September 8^th. 

For my June send-off, I often paint a pretty solemn “state of PSE” picture. Not gonna lie: 2025-26 has been a bit of a rough year. However, with the exception of British Columbia (sorry guys, you’re pretty much toast), I am pretty sure our sector has already hit bottom in most of the country. It’s not exactly going to be clear sailing from here but there’s light at the end of the tunnel.

Here are some reasons I am optimistic:

First, I am told by some Ottawa folks that the federal government is dimly beginning to grasp what kind of damage it has done to higher education. Not the department that matters, of course (i.e. IRCC), because that would be to admit that a mistake or forty was made, and the basic rule of bureaucratic infallibility does not allow them to see this. Rather, it’s other departments like Defence and Industry who keep looking to the sector and asking: “why aren’t you guys stepping up and contributing?” to whatever it is they need help with on a given day. And when it is patiently explained to them that the sector just lost a few billions of dollars thanks to Marc Miller’s attempt to play federal higher education minister, they go away shaking their heads wondering how things could have been messed up so badly.

(I know, I know. How could they not know? How could they not have seen it when everybody told them this would happen!?Just remember that official Ottawa is – on a good day – 50% ignorance and 50% arrogance. This is why I don’t live there: the combination makes my head explode frequently enough as it is.)

This dawning realization does not, unfortunately, mean a change of policy is imminent. That would be too easy. What it does mean is that there are now voices inside government suggesting that change might be needed. Personally, I don’t see movement for at least another 2-3 years. But the point is there is a little bit of momentum – the trick is to keep it going steadily, as we start building up international enrolments again (which is certainly going to happen if for no other reasons than they can’t really get lower than they were this term). 

Second, there is what happened earlier this year in Ontario and the Ford government’s huge injection of funds into the higher education sector. (I know, I know. Bear with me).

Although the government did not say so explicitly on budget day, a look at Ontario budget estimates (which for reasons that defy explanation come out weeks after the budget) indicates that the province will spend more on transfers to post-secondary education in 2026-27 than it ever has before. Ever. It’s well over a billion dollars in extra funding, enough to wipe out all the losses in funding that have been building up since the early Kathleen Wynne era. For the first time in fifteen years, the percentage of total Canadian provincial government spending devoted to post-secondary institutions rose. That’s a big deal. That’s momentum to build on.

(And yes, a good chunk of it was stolen from students, which was obviously bad. And yes, the government has been spinning some weird lies about needing to “save” OSAP when quite clearly the reason OSAP was in trouble was because the Ford government has allowed certain private vocational colleges to loot the program over the past several years (there will be more to come on this story, for sure – it’s a billion-dollar oversight to which no one wants to own up). And yes, Ontario is still tenth out of ten provinces in per-student spending on post-secondary education: even a billion dollars doesn’t erase decades of pan-partisan underfunding. And yes, Ontario institutions are still much worse off now than they were two years ago because a billion public dollars don’t make up for the loss of $4 billion (give or take) in funds from international students. All true. It still doesn’t detract that for the first time in nearly twenty years, an Ontario government saw fit to make a big investment in public institutions).

So, think about it. We’ve probably hit bottom on international student numbers (there’s nowhere to go but up). That means we may be at a turning point on public funding. But on top of that are the important cultural changes that I think are happening on Canadian campuses, which I outlined back here. Though academic communities are notoriously change-resistant, there are in fact communities of change at lots of Canadian institutions and they are gaining in force. It’s not just revenue loss that is leading people to re-assess what we do and how we do it; external economic and technological changes are leading people to re-think how it is that institutions can and should execute their historical mission. As I said a few weeks ago with respect to AI:

“The core tasks of universities with respect to teaching and learning – that is, taking semi-formed teenagers and turning them into useful, engaged members of society that can contribute positively to their communities and workplaces – will remain the same. But the methods by which universities pursue these tasks, both in terms of pedagogy and assessment, are almost certainly going to change and – this is the important bit – universities risk losing the trust of society if they do not.”

I am excited about the ways I see people tackling such problems, maybe even more so than I am excited about the fact the sector is at the start of a financial recovery. But let me gently suggest that there is one thing which is going to hinder our ability to make meaningful positive change, and that is an insistence that every institution – sometimes every faculty – has to re-invent the wheel every time it wants to make a major change. That’s an absurd duplication of effort and will lead to frustration and gridlock. 

The key here is for Canadian institutions to get better at thinking and acting collectively. In particular:

The sector has to get better at learning together. Here’s a secret: whatever you want to know about how to offer new or better services, develop new programs, etc. – there’s other institutions out there that have been working on it. We can always learn from each other, and we can definitely learn from experiences elsewhere. As organizations, Canada’s universities and colleges need to start learning faster, and there’s no more efficient way to do this than by learning together.

The sector has to get better at dreaming together. Everyone in Advancement will tell you that for an institution to make itself attractive to donors is to outline an ambition – a belief that an institution can do big things and bring great benefits to its community. You can’t just cower and ask not to absorb any more cuts: you have to set a vision and go for it. It’s the same for the sector as a whole. We need to put together an ambitious vision for how higher education can work together with various sectors of society to make Canada more knowledge-intensive and thus safer, more equal and more prosperous. What the sector need is to start setting ambitious collective goals for 2035 or 2040, things that will make people want to support the system in ways they simply haven’t in the past two decades. Peak representative bodies in Ottawa (e.g. Universities Canada) or provincial capitals aren’t set up to do that – their horizons, like governments’, are at best 36 months out – so we need to find new mechanisms to do this big picture thinking.

The sector has to get better at working together. I know competition is built into our institutions’ DNA. But there are lots of ways institutions can work together better, be it through sharing of capital assets (especially abroad if institutions are getting into the transnational education space), or working together on common projects. My favourite example of this is the University Innovation Alliance in the United States, where a dozen plus major universities across the country banded together to figure out how to improve completion rates: in the past decade they have collectively graduated roughly 200,000 additional students above the baseline, simply by experimenting together and figuring out what works, what doesn’t, and how to make innovations spread.

If we do all of this, then folks, I promise you: the road back to a great post-secondary is going to be a lot quicker.

Hope you have a great summer. See you back in eleven weeks.