The new Ontario Government doesn’t seem to have a lot of ideas around post-secondary education.  The only policy it has implemented to date is to give the go-ahead to plans drafted under the Liberals to get moving on a Francophone university in Toronto.  This project, as I have said before, has always been based on some deeply unrealistic assumptions, mainly that there is huge unmet demand for French-language education in southern Ontario that Glendon, Laurentian and Ottawa are too inattentive to have noticed.  My guess is this will be a serious financial white elephant in much the same vein as the College des Grands Lacs 15 years ago.  Anyway, at least the disaster, when it occurs, will be seen as a bipartisan one (which is good in that politicizing language issues is never good, but bad in that everyone will have a reason not to remember the failure and we’ll be back making the same mistakes in the early 2040s).

But just because it hasn’t spent a lot of time thinking about PSE to date doesn’t mean it can’t do a lot of good.  Here are a few ideas for a Tory agenda:

1)      Cut Red Tape.  There is a great deal of pointless (or at least contentious) government regulation in the post-secondary education sector.  A few years ago, Australian universities claimed to spend close to $280 million on “red tape”, and though I doubt Ontario PSE institutions would make quite so extravagant a claim, there is no doubt that there is a lot of the reporting institutions do to government is pretty pointless.  The most frustrating aspects of government regulations are the ones that deal with approval of new programs, which not only take months but seriously impeded the ability of universities and colleges (mostly colleges) to rapidly adapt to changing market opportunities.  A Tory government could probably generate a lot of good will in the sector by quickly instituting a “red tape” commission with a goal of eliminating pointless reports and letting institutions respond to market opportunities more freely.

2)      Public Transparency.  While cutting down on reporting to government is a worthwhile exercise, there’s still a pretty good conservative case for making institutions a lot more transparent than they currently are, especially when it comes to reporting about staff numbers and placement rates in graduate/professional programs.  The Council of Ontario Universities has made some progress recently in reporting around faculty productivity, but these efforts should simply be made mandatory and routine.

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3)      Funding Formulas and Value for Money.  The last government almost decided to make a decent funding formula, one that focussed on outcomes rather than simple student numbers.  Then either the Minister or the Deputy (or both) got cold feet and decided to just re-jig the existing formula in tiny ways, mostly to protect a few institutions struggling with low enrolment.  A Tory government looking to make institutions more outcome-focused could revive the idea of an outcome-based formula and drive it through.  More broadly, this government could start creating policy frameworks which forced institutions to start thinking about how to show value-for-money.  This isn’t an area I’d urge them to get into activist policy-making because I think there is a lot about value-for-money that we don’t understand very well.  But even simple things like showing expenditure per graduate (by field) and expenditure per scientific publication or per citation would be helpful in thinking about how to improve effectiveness.

4)      Choice and Competition: one of the most outrageous facts in Canadian post-secondary education is that students in the GTA, a census area with over 5 million people, effectively have only five universities to choose from (Toronto, York, Ryerson, U of T and Guelph-Humber, and none of these has a campus with fewer than 15,000 students. As far as I know, there is no other area with 5 million in the world that has so few choices available to students or one that forces students into such gargantuan institutions.  Solutions:

i) don’t cut the funding for new campuses in Brantford and Milton;
ii) allow colleges to deliver a lot more degree-level courses to create stronger alternatives to universities;
iii) invite in (with modest subsidies) foreign providers to challenge incumbents, much as New York City is doing with Cornell and Technion-Israel, and
iv) make it easier to start up new private universities (main barrier right now: new institutions aren’t allowed to take in international students).

One last thing: the Conservatives did make a promise about “protecting free speech on campus”.  This is one of those annoying right-wing wedge issues which I’ve written about before.  There is a good way and a bad way for the Conservatives to adhere to this pledge.  The bad way is one which effectively requires institutions to host speakers regardless of their opinions or affiliations.  This is patently ridiculous.  Not only does it foist a lot of security costs on institutions but it puts them in the position of having to acquiesce to having their names associated with some truly hateful people (as Wilfrid Laurier did last year when it chose to allow White Nationalist Faith Goldy to speak on campus), or worse, prevent them from banning Nazis from assembling on campus (as University of Toronto did last year).  The better way is simply to say that public institutions have to guarantee freedom of speech and freedom of assembly of all students and staff on campus (which, subject to various laws on hate speech, they are more or less bound to do anyway).   This is the policy of the United Conservative Policy of Alberta and the qualification about applying only to members of the campus community sidesteps most of the obvious idiocies involved in a “pure” free speech position.

So that’s my advice to the new Minister, Ms. Merrillee Fullerton: a mostly ideologically-coherent package four-point which is pro-student, pro-transparency, pro-competition, pro-increased value.  Perfect for any Conservative government looking to make improvements when money is in short supply.  Feel free to steal as much of it as you want.