As I noted yesterday, the Canadian post-secondary sector seems to be in a deep public funding rut. We’re in the 12^th year of flat budgets, and no political party – whether in government or opposition – seems inclined to reverse this.  What to do?   Well, in the strategic planning business, the first thing you look for are goals.  The second thing you look for are barriers to those goals.  So, let’s try that out by confronting why no government wants to fund higher education institutions.  What’s the barrier?

Historically, there have been two main rationales for public funding in higher education.  The first was about social mobility and making sure there were enough spaces for everyone who wanted them.  The second was about economic growth: training the people and making the discoveries that would lead to a more prosperous future.  The first one has, in a sense, dropped from the agenda because we now have a nearly universal system, and thus more or less all the seats we are ever going to need.  For the past 15 years or so, it has been the second rationale that has propelled higher education.  And it’s also where the current problem lies.  It is not so much that higher education isn’t seen as an answer to the problem of growth (though that is part of the issue).  No, the real issue is that few people care about growth anymore.

Politically, there is no longer a political home for growth-oriented policies in Canada.  If you look at the last federal campaign, all the slogans were about how to move around relatively small chunks of cash around in order to make different segments of the economy feel richer by marginally reducing taxes, or bullying cell phone companies into lowering prices, or paying for some people’s dental bills, or what have you.  But policies to increase collective wealth?  To make the economy richer, more productive, more able to support higher private-sector salaries and higher public-sector spending?  Nowhere to be seen.  And that goes double for provincial parties, too.  At best, their conception of drivers of economic growth involves reducing tax rates (if you’re a right-wing government, anyway), exploiting natural resources, or building an enormous thing (unbelievably cost-inefficient hydro dams are a particular favourite).  The entire idea of a knowledge economy seems to be off the table: it’s been ages since any winning political party thought to reference it.

The problem is that without an interest in growth, there is really no reason for any government to treat post-secondary education as something to invest in. What that means, in turn, is that for higher education to see more investment, it is going to have to re-ignite discussion around growth and its importance.  The terms of debate must change. And that means that influencer strategies must radically change.

It’s going to mean raising an alarm about how complacent Canadians have become about the sources of their income.  It’s going to mean confronting some of our business and technological deficiencies (for example, why is Canada is one of only three OECD countries where business currently spends less on R&D than it did in 2007?)  It’s going to mean talking about the real barriers to growth (in particular, massive cost inflation in housing in our major cities).  No more happy talk, and no more nostalgia for manufacturing and natural resources: we need to talk how our economic futures depend on mastering the intangible economy, and how constantly feeding the construction industry is an insufficient condition for prosperity.

You don’t need to do this by talking down current governments.  But it does mean getting the country to embrace the idea that we can be better.  Make it a challenge: something like being among the world’s most advanced and fairest economies by 2040.  Make it something very broad-based: a movement that can work at both federal and provincial levels, encouraging all levels of government (municipalities should be part of the picture too) to think about how we can make Canada grow through greater knowledge-intensity.

Prosperity, as Matt Ridley once said, is the product of ideas having sex with one another.  And that means greater city density.  It means immigration, more housing, anything to make our economic clusters denser and more skilled.  It means joined-up thinking about how to improve cities, how to speed up firm formation, and deepen the pool of labour market skills.  But it also means ensuring inclusive growth – that we have policies to make sure communities outside the big cities can participate in growth, and that within the dense city clusters, everyone can be full participants in the economy – and that means attention to issues like Equity, Diversity and Inclusion. 

This isn’t a movement universities and colleges can lead alone.  It will take a lot of allies and a lot of coalition-building.  It means talking to the business community (the forward-looking bits of it, anyway).  It means talking to the NGOs and local community groups, to include them in a coalition which can make cities cheaper (preferably by massive investments in housing), more innovative, and more inclusive.  And it means bringing Indigenous nations and smaller communities into the discussion, too, because right now the rural communities agenda is utterly divorced from any discussion of skills and education and that’s terribly wrong and dangerous.  Better strategies for delivering post-secondary education in smaller communities must be part of a long-term growth agenda as well.

But getting governments to think about growth again is only phase 1.  There’s still the matter of trusting universities and colleges to carry out their part of the deal.  There is quite a tradition (in universities at least) of simply claiming that whatever they do is necessarily good for the community.  That’s not good enough.  If you’re going to stake your claim on growth and society-building, you need to actually show that this is what is happening.  And this means much more attention to outputs – to graduate skills and to institutional community and business partnerships (the latter of which is, remarkably, not included in any province’s system of external quality assurance).  Phase 2, in short, is about actually executing on acting as economic engines, rather than just asserting this to be true.

This isn’t easy, obviously.  And it’s certainly a big departure from what Canadian PSE has been doing for the last two-and-a-half decades.  But it’s time to recognize that the external environment in which PSE operates has definitively changed.  Governments haven’t so much lost faith in post-secondary education as they have lost faith in the purposes of post-secondary education.  Bringing them back around to this positive purpose needs to take centre stage.  Because if we can’t turn this around, there’s only two paths open to institutions: a long, protracted austerity, or an ever-deeper dependence on international students. 

Take your pick.

Have a good weekend.  The blog will be off next week: See you again on November 2