Back in early December, the Ottawa Citizen reported on a controversy at the University of Ottawa. Basically, the story was that the University is facing a $20 million budget shortfall, the administration is consulting re: how to cut its budget and some people are very upset with some of the proposed solutions.
Of course, cutbacks anywhere, anytime, are unacceptable to someone in the institution. The library, for instance, is being asked to contemplate a cut of $2 million). “A source” told the Citizen that such a cut would “decimate its holdings and – horror of horrors – “severely damage its reputation”.
(Regular readers of this column may recall some data on library statistics I published earlier this year. A quick check here suggests that even with these cuts, library expenditures per student at Ottawa would still be ahead of the not-reputationally-challenged-last-I-heard Queen’s, and that University of Ottawa has over the past ten years increased its collections budget by 50%. Even with the proposed cuts, it would still have the largest net increase in funding of any research university library in the country since 2004. It would be surprising, to say the least, if any real reputational damage ensued from this.
How did Ottawa get into this position in the first place? Here’s what a university spox told the Citizen: “The University of Ottawa is one of many Ontario universities facing financial challenges. This is due in part to a permanent reduction in revenues from the provincial government of two per cent (over 2012-2013 levels) in government grants per registered students, resulting in decreased funding … At the same time, the university’s expenditures, especially those related to salaries, benefits, and special payments for pension plans continue to grow.”
OK, so let’s parse this. Government has actually increased funding since 2012-13, not decreased. Not by much, admittedly, but it has increased. And the funding formula hasn’t changed. So if “dollars per student” are down, it’s because a) the University is admitting more students outside the formula (i.e. international students), or b) it’s new enrolments are disproportionately enrolled in “cheap” subjects like Arts and business, rather than expensive ones like medicine – and that’s bringing down the ratio of “basic income units” (Ontario government jargon for “weighted student units” in an enrolment-driven funding formula) to actual students. The third option is that c) other universities have chosen to grow faster than University of Ottawa, thus dropping its share of system-wide BIUs slightly. I have no idea which of these is true – I’m fairly confident both “a” and “b” are true but am not sure about “c”, but in any case those are institutional policy decisions, not government ones. Blaming the government for them isn’t really kosher.
The government could of course, be blamed for not putting more money in the system as a whole. But look – this province had a $17 billion deficit no so long ago. The 2010 provincial budget was crystal clear that between 2010 and 2016, total program funding was only going to increase by $5 billion (about 4.4%). In fact, universities as a whole did better than this: they got an increase of about 6% in nominal terms (yes, still a decrease in real terms but actually better than anticipated). The University of Ottawa got an increase of about 5% in that period.
Would life be easier if government wrote bigger checks? Sure. But everyone has had plenty of warning that government assistance wasn’t going to be increasing very much. The real question is: given that everyone knew this, why were university expenditures allowed to grow so much?
Well, let’s go back to the summer of 2013, when the university was negotiating a new contract with the Association of Professors of the University of Ottawa (APUO). Remember, at this point, everyone had known for more than three years that government wasn’t coming through with new money anytime soon. And yet the institution conceded this astonishing deal. The APUO’s summary of the deal is here, but the two key bits were:
- A guaranteed increase in academic/librarian staff complement of 4% (from 1250 to 1311).
- An increase in pay of 11.5% on top of PTR over four years (but really three since the deal was backdated to 2012).
The result: between 2010 and 2016, the period in which government said “sorry guys, no more money”, aggregate expenditures on academic staff salaries – the biggest single line-item in the institution’s budget – increased by 29.4%.
Did I mention that the Faculty Union responsible for this $50 million rise in costs has launched a grievance re: the cuts? No? Well, now you know.
Of course, that’s not the only reason the university is in trouble. While U of O made valiant efforts to increase its revenues in other ways (revenue from investments increased, and revenue from fees rose almost 45%, thanks in part to higher fees but equally if not more to increased international student enrolment), it wasn’t exactly doing much to curb expenditures in non-salary items either. Sure, academic staff wages were increasing at close to 5% per year throughout this period, but other operating costs were rising at a little over 4%. Bluntly: strong cost controls are not in place. There’s blame to go around here.
It may seem like I am picking on the University of Ottawa, but trust me: I could tell a story like this about virtually any university in the country. Governments are not ponying up for higher education the way they used to. Student fees – international student fees especially – have made up some but not all of the gap. Faculty unions are demanding pay increases in excess of institutional income growth and by and large they are getting them. And cost controls in other areas of spending are little more effective.
Something has to give.
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Just a university funding geek note: U of O is not wrong to point to a change in funding per student, so the attempt to explain the reduction in dollars per student in paragraph 5 is not quite accurate. You don’t need to change the formula to reduce the value of the basic income unit , all you have to do is reduce the value in dollars that the same basic income unit ends up representing. This was one of the changes in the “policy levers” adopted by the government of Ontario, I believe first announced in Budget 2012. More funding has come to the universities because of increases in enrollments, but not as much funding as would have come to them without the changes in the grant per student dollars. Part of the growth in enrollment was funded by reducing the dollars per student. So there was a change between 2010-16. That does not change anything said above about the impact of rising costs, of course, as anyone dealing with a university budget will know.
A belated comment ( I catch up here only a once a semester):
A bit more context – that I think illuminates more fundamental problems with University governance – might help explain the outcry at the University of Ottawa.
First, the large increases in the library in the last decade were due to the fact that for decades, the UofO library budget was among the lowest (most years THE lowest) among research libraries in the province per student (per CAUBO and CARL data). About 10 years ago there was a welcome shift, and even special catch-up budgets to fill in significant gaps. Some adjustment now therefore is not surprising, but the increases were reasonable and necessary. There is never enough context?
Second: the admittedly a bit over the top reaction was due to the fact that the cuts were announced with no consultation. We were suddenly facing long lists of cancelled journals and research tools that included venerable, absolutely essential titles (Oxford English dictionaries, for example). Only after the alarm went out, did we receive information that some of the cancellations were of duplicate subscriptions. Then began a very long process of going through the lists, asking precisely what format and subscription was being cut, checking whether there was a duplicate access …. hours of work and e-mails between departments and specialist librarians. Things have turned out all right, because the library adjusted to the outcry. Had the project included proper communication from the start (an exact list of titles including which electronic access was being cut and which retained) then there would have been no outcry, no Citizen article etc. and hours of work saved.
Ultimately, more could have been cut (the library backtracked on cutting on a couple huge, overpriced, aggregate subscriptions that will continue to increase their prices far above inflation rate as long as they have a captive clientele. Most professors I know understand the problems with the Elseviers-Springers et al and a well prepared program of cuts would have gotten most on board.)
Which raises the larger question about governance: how often do university administrations create problems by trying to bypass consultation and their obsession with secrecy?