The first two big provincial budgets of the year came from British Columbia and Alberta and they could not have been more different.

To start out in Victoria, the folks in BC had a nice, tidy, almost do-nothing budget.  Grants to institutions rose by 1% – that is, slightly less than inflation – while spending on student aid rose by nearly 23%.  Some but not all of that money went to a new “BC Access Grant” which got trumpeted all over the place.  This is a little complicated, so buckle up.

Currently the Canada Student Loans Program gives “low-income students” (don’t ask, it depends on province, family size and dependent/independent status) in programs of two years length or more (this is a way of keeping out private vocational schools) $3,200 per year in grants, assuming an 8-month school year.  This new BC Access Grant tops this up by $800 to a flat $4,000 to those eligible, and creates from thin air a new, matching $4000 grant for students in eligible programs of less than two years’ length in public institutions (i.e. mostly vocational certificates). 

This would be all well and good, were it not for the fact that in the last election the federal Liberals committed themselves to raising that maximum to $3,000 per year, and presumably that change is going to get enacted in the upcoming federal budget.  Which means if you read the BC plan literally, there is no more $800 top-up because those students will already be over $4000.  Plus, the province is planning on axing some unspecified existing grant programs (no details in the budget, but my money is on the existing completion grants), in part to pay for these new grants whose basis is now unclear.  My guess is that once the feds raise the threshold, BC will find some different way to top-up and level-up, thus keeping the overall spend the same.  But the communications on this are going to be made unnecessarily complicated and weird as a result.

Now, over to Edmonton, where the provincial government, fresh from an October 2019 budget in which they cut institutional transfers by an average of about 6%, wiped out grants for campus maintenance, increased student loan interest rates and eliminated tax credits worth $110 million plus (when fully phased-in: credits earned prior to 19-20 will still be honoured), decided to lay down the boom one more time.  This year’s cuts were not as spectacular – funding for operating grants went down by $120 million or so, which in some ways was counter-balanced by a restoration of over $110 million in money for campus maintenance. 

The problem is that, as was the case last year, the cuts seem to be unequally distributed for reasons that seem extremely obscure.  As this CBC report shows, some institutions are facing losses of 1% while others like the University of Alberta are reporting losses cuts of 9% or higher (U of A itself says the cut is 11%; my understanding is that the difference has to do with the fact that there are multiple funding envelopes and the cuts are not equal across all of them).  The government claims to have made a careful study of each institution and measured each one against comparators in other provinces, and in theory that’s great, but man do I have questions about this.

First of all: how do you actually pick a list of similar institutions?  Equalizing factors like student numbers in different fields of study is actually really difficult (I’ve done it a few times over the years for clients and believe me it ain’t easy) even if the institutions are in fact comparable.  But what do you do when there generally are no comparable institutions elsewhere? For instance, I’m told they used BCIT as a comparator with NAIT and SAIT, and that sounds wild to me because the latter two by design are a lot more capital intensive. 

But maybe more importantly, if you just compare the provincial transfer to institutions without thinking about the rest of the regulatory environment, you are going to get some pretty weird results.  So, for instance, I understand that the cut to the University of Alberta was justified in part by the fact that provincial grants per student to the U of A were twice as high as they are at the University of Toronto.  That’s true, as far as it goes.  But remember, U of T also benefits from much higher tuition fees both from international and domestic students – in fact, Toronto takes in more just from international student tuition than it does from Queen’s Park.  So, if the Alberta government is simpatico with the idea of higher fees and more international students, then this cut to the U of A probably makes sense.  But if not then this comparison with U of T seems less a rationale than a rationalization.  It would be helpful if the government could clarify this point.

In short, the BC budget was mostly ho-hum for institutions (a below-inflation increase from a government that could afford more) plus a well-intentioned but weirdly-executed and frankly not all that large an increase to bursaries.  The Alberta budget is mildly bad for some institutions and really bad for others and there’s no plum for students.   One’s clearly better for the sector than the other, but the gap isn’t quite as wide as the headlines might have you think. 

And it’s another reminder (if any were needed) that governments with surpluses can do nice things for institutions in ways that governments with deficits cannot. 

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On another note, two errata from recent blogs.

Back here, when talking about administrative bloat I made a claim about U of T faculty numbers going down 6% between 2010 and 2018,  I goofed.  The data for the two years were not compatible (I made the boneheaded mistake of not re-checking data I had collected five years ago to make sure I had consistent definitions), and I included Senior Lecturers in the first year but not the second.  In fact, faculty numbers have increased somewhat, though still nowhere near close to how much expenditures on faculty salaries have risen.

And speaking of boneheaded, yesterday was really bad.  If you received the email version of the blog, you will have seen a whole discussion about the new francophone university in which I actually managed to get the institution’s name wrong 100% of the time.  It is Université de l’Ontario Français (UOF) not l’Université Français de l’Ontario (UFO).  I actually knew that but sometimes when you get on a roll when writing….anyway, it was a deeply cringe-worthy moment when I woke up and saw what I had posted and realized the mistake.

Apologies in both cases.