Alberta wasn’t the only province to release a report on post-secondary education last Thursday.  Out in St. John’s, the three commissioners of the Independent Review of the Post-Secondary Education System in Newfoundland and Labrador finally, after much delay, published its report, pithily entitled All Hands on Deck.  

Just to give you a rundown on the province before we get into the report: Newfoundland and Labrador has two multi-campus institutions, Memorial University of Newfoundland (MUN for short) and the College of the North Atlantic (CNA).  Most people think of MUN as having two campuses, the one in St. John’s which makes up about 80% of all enrolments and the smaller Grenfell Campus in Corner Brook.  The Marine Institute is, for funding purposes, considered a third campus (it’s within walking distance – in summer, anyway – up the hill from the St. John’s campus). MUN also has a Signal Hill campus and a campus in Harlow, England. Finally, MUN also operates the Labrador Institute in Happy Valley-Goose Bay, which, for some reason, is not designated a campus.  College of the North Atlantic has seventeen (count ‘em!) locations, which is both a function of the province’s widely dispersed population and is also far too many to make any kind of financial sense. 

What this means is that system-level policy in a place like Newfoundland and Labrador – whether it be everyday oversight, or a big set-piece like the Independent Review – is tricky.  MUN and CNA are multi-campus institutions, but they are significantly more centralized than the Université du Québec.  In a very real way, there isn’t a system, per se: there are just two institutions.  So, making “system-level” policy can look a lot like micro-managing the affairs of two institutions.

All Hands on Deck reflects this.  An awful lot of what passes for system-level review is telling individual campuses how to conduct their business.  Recommendation 54: “CNA to review availability of diverse food options in their food services.”  Recommendation 75: “MUN to enhance supports for Indigenous students at Grenfell campus.”.  And on and on.  In theory, the review’s mandate was to create a “strategic vision” for the province’s post-secondary system; in practice, about 80% of the report’s recommendations are in this vein: the commissioners’ opinions on how each institution could be run better.  It’s not so much that the opinions are wrong; indeed, with respect to Memorial (an institution where HESA does quite a lot of work) I see a significant amount of overlap between what the commissioners are recommending and the direction the institution has already concluded it should head.  But in which case: what’s the added value of the “system-level” report?

To the extent that a system-level report can be of assistance in a place like Newfoundland and Labrador is to help shape government policy rather than institutional policy.  Institutions can and will respond to government priorities, and the real issue is to make sure those priorities are the correct ones.  Overall, the report does not do a bad job here.  It may be wishing against any reasonable common sense that the government maintain current levels of funding (I can’t see how that’s going to work with a $2 billion provincial deficit and oil prices still well short of what is needed to get it into balance), but the commissioners recommend it anyway.  It talks about getting institutions to focus more on a few areas related to provincial economic growth and about getting the institutions and the province to focus more on better data collection and usage.  In a very distinct echo of the Alberta report, it recommends giving the institutions more independence in terms of governance.  This is all to the good.

But I argue that on the most important issues facing the province in terns of higher education, the commissioners punted.  The first was on tuition fees.  Everyone – and I mean literally everyone – knows that after twenty years, the tuition fee freeze must go.  It might have made sense when provincial coffers are flush, but with public spending in decline, it can only harm these institutions.  It might have made some sense when it seemed to attract students from elsewhere in the Atlantic some of whom might stay in the province and help reverse population decline, but as Memorial professor Dale Kirby noted recently, out-of-province student numbers have been crashing recently.  Of course, such a course is politically unpopular – and that’s precisely why the government asked an independent review panel to bail it out by making a strong recommendation with respect to tuition.

But the panel baulked.    While it recommended lifting the tuition freeze, it chose not to give the government much in the way of guidance with respect to how to do this.  Instead, we get generalities and platitudes.  It recommended that the institutions “replace the tuition freeze with a tuition model that: reflects and respects the priorities of the university and the province; takes into consideration the impacts on student access to university education; and explicitly considers the true costs of supporting students being accepted into programs within the university”, and that the government “establish guiding principles and parameters within which post-secondary institutions are expected to operate with respect to tuition and fee increases” as well as put “parameters around fee differentials for different groups of students – residents of Newfoundland and Labrador, Canadians, international students (both undergraduate and graduate)”.   

It was a similar issue with the other big hot-potato handed to the review – how to shrink the number of CNA campuses to something more manageable.  Instead, all they say is that “The College of the North Atlantic has 17 campuses located throughout the province. Many of the rural campuses of CNA are currently underutilized in terms of enrolment in traditional programming,” and follow this up by recommending that “The Government of Newfoundland and Labrador and the College of the North Atlantic repurpose some CNA campuses as Community Access Centres.“  How many?  Which ones?  Silence. 

I am betting there are not many people in the Confederation Building who think this approach is helpful.

You get the gist: it’s not so much that any of the recommendations are howlers, so much as that the overall direction is skewed.  The report is knee-deep in recommendations which micro-manage institutions in ways that are anything but strategic, while at the same time refusing to give detailed guidance on the most important strategic priorities facing the province.  Possibly the commissioners chose to be vague on areas where they disagreed amongst themselves, but whatever the reason, this report seems like something of a wasted opportunity even though it is not actually significantly wrong about anything.