Since it is budget season, and I am increasingly depressed about the prospects for better higher education funding, I thought I should share some musings I have had recently about how to make a better case for funding. I think there is a better story available than the one the sector has been using. And it even has the advantage of being true.

Ready? Here it is.

As a country, we are losing the skills race because we aren’t investing enough in skills infrastructure.

It’s a pretty simple story: if you want to produce the best workers in the world, they need to be training on the best equipment. This is pretty much how Waterloo got to be the greatest co-op university in the world—it bought top equipment and let students loose to play with it, at a time when the University of Toronto was still arguing about whether or not undergraduates should be allowed into the stacks at the Robarts library. Students trained on the best equipment are by far better trained and better able to meet the needs of employers. That makes for more prosperous and innovative companies, and a richer country able to pay for more of the things we want, both individually and collectively.

To be clear: some universities and colleges in Canada do have some pretty groovy labs and trades centres. But some of them are in pretty rough shape, using equipment that is outdated by three or even four decades. At trades centres, donations from industry make up some of the difference (for example, donations of large vehicles for Heavy-duty Mechanics programs), but that’s sporadic and what is donated is not always itself very up-to-date. It’s the same with laboratories: some institutions have up-to-date equipment that undergraduates can use and others don’t (and still others are still dealing with asbestos problems that should have been solved decades ago). The lack of up-to-date equipment means students can’t learn the latest techniques. To be clear: that doesn’t hinder the ability of graduates from all these programs to get jobs. But that’s because we are in a long-term labour shortage due to a demographic transition and jobs have to be given to somebody. The point, though, is that the quality of the graduates is affected. And so, over the long term, is the quality of the entire labour force.

(I have made the argument about Canadian post-secondary policy being wrongly obsessed with quantity over quality before, see here for the best summation. Consider today’s argument an extension of this earlier intervention).

Why has this happened? Well, a lot of provincial governments—Quebec, Alberta and British Columbia being partial exceptions—simply gave up on funding capital in post-secondary institutions after the Great Financial Crisis. Now they just wait for the next recession so the feds can show up with some kind of “Knowledge Infrastructure” program which is in fact just a disguise for a massive subsidy for the construction industry, because the feds’ ideas about how Keynesian-ism works are still stuck in the 20^th century.

Ontario recently has put a lot of money into new trades training facilities—some of which look pretty nifty!—but specifically excluded any public educational institutions from getting any money. That’s because the ostensible purpose of the program hides the real one, which is detaching the loyalty of the trades unions who run these facilities from the Liberals and NDP and reassigning them to the Conservatives. Judging by union private-sector union endorsements in the last election, this policy has been a roaring success. In any event, the lack of training equipment is a huge barrier not just to quality but to quantity as well. I have lost track of how many college Presidents in Ontario have told me how difficult it is to keep up trades programs because of the state of the equipment (let alone the fact that they pretty much all lose money on every single apprentice they take in for short-term training).

The good news is, of course, that governments prefer spending on capital and infrastructure than they do operating budgets. Part of it, of course, is that politicians like cutting ribbons, and this is easier to do on a new building than it is on a new Collective Agreement. But part of it also is governments prefer giving money to projects where money goes to working-class folks than they do to feed salaries of folks making $100K, $150K, $200K and up. It’s just politics. So shifting the pitch from “give us more operating funds,” to “give us more capital funds” actually makes good political sense, both at the provincial level but also especially at the federal level (the fiscal picture has change significantly since I wrote this piece on making capital spending in post-secondary education an explicitly federal area of responsibility but some of the political logic still holds, I think). And, perhaps best of all, it’s a program that both universities and colleges can get behind. And a unified front is definitely what is needed these days.

So why doesn’t this happen? Inertia, for sure. People get stuck advocating traditional positions and it’s hard to switch. But the two biggest ones are:

• Distributional arguments within academia. This is a bigger issue in universities than colleges, but a switch to a more obvious skills/infrastructure agenda will create aggravation among those faculties which dislike the “skills” framing and are not particularly infrastructure heavy. You know who I’m talking about
• Perceptions of short-term urgency. In a world where many institutions are running budget deficits (or will do so imminently), it might seem weird to focus on long-term priorities rather than shorter-term ones like keeping the lights on and making payroll. And I concede that in Ontario, at the provincial level, short-term priorities probably need to take precedence. But elsewhere I am not so sure. As I mentioned recently, (here and here) the idea that post-secondary institutes are going to be “saved” by anything other than becoming fundamentally leaner organizations and finding new non-government sources of funds seems kind of fanciful. In that kind of situation, institutions should be trying to get money out of government however they can, not necessarily in the areas institutions would prefer.

(I’d also argue that more government spending on infrastructure would to some extent relieve institutions from the burden of having to build up large end-of-year annual surpluses to keep self-funding capital expenditures…money is to some extent fungible and every little bit help).

You may of course ask “is this true?” That is, can I prove the link between infrastructure and workforce-wide skills and competitiveness? And the answer is: no, of course not. It’s a hunch, and one with an eye to a winning political argument rather than empirical fact. Give me a couple of hundred thousand dollars in research money and I might come up with something plausible.

But I’ll tell you what: it’s no less implausible than the “give-universities-money-for-whatever-and-a- flourishing-middle-class-will-suddenly-appear” story that some people have been peddling for the last couple of decades.