Here’s an important question. Why don’t Canadian governments act as if outputs matter when it comes to funding universities and colleges?
There’s nowhere in Canada where the overwhelming majority of operating funding isn’t essentially determined by enrolments (OK, you get goofy exceptions like Nova Scotia where the funding formula is based on what enrolment was in 2003, but apart from that…). But this creates no incentives other than to try increase market share, which essentially is a zero-sum game. It’s also really dull.
If we want to shake things up and get institutions to pursue differentiation, we need to go in a radically different direction. And in this respect, I’m a big proponent of the methods of the X Prize Foundation. Put a carrot out there big enough for institutions to pursue and institutions will change their behavior.
Interested in emphasizing good teaching? Why not offer $50 million annually to the institution that comes top on teaching quality in the next Globe and Mail satisfaction exercise? I guarantee that dozens of institutions will snap to it in terms of emphasizing teaching.
(Yes, yes, I know it’s an imperfect measure of teaching. But do it once and it’s an absolutely certainty that institutions will come up with a better measurement method the next year, so why not, you know?)
One could do the same kind of thing in terms of all sorts of outputs. The institution with the greatest impact on local economies? $40 million every five years. The institution that does the most to improve graduate employability? $80 million every five years. The amounts don’t actually matter that much, as long as they are big enough to drive institutional behaviour.
Where quantitative data can’t quite provide a definitive answer, adjudication can be done entirely by academics themselves (though preferably ones from out-of-province or from other countries) – by all means, let’s keep the principle of peer review. If nothing else, it will make institutions pay attention to their own outputs a lot more assiduously, which would be a good in and of itself.
As we saw yesterday, academia left to itself won’t provide diversity. You can try to tie institutions down to particular missions, but that’s likely to meet with resistance. So why not put down the stick and try some carrots instead? Considering how badly we’ve done at incentivizing diversity to date, the downside seems pretty minimal.
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I think many faculty would prefer a teaching-focused career or more balance between teaching and research. Under the current reward structure it is irrational to emphasize teaching over research if you want tenure or promotion.
There’s no incentive for universities to emphasize teaching either when they’re allowed to contract out about half of their undergraduate teaching to non-faculty at less than half the cost.
This doesn’t mean that all or even most professors like or want the over-emphasis on research. The mad scramble to get research grants and to publish is unattractive to many people. As a recent Ph.D., I see many of my peers turning away from academia for these very reasons.
So, I’m all for government pushing universities to value teaching more. But I don’t know if differentiated missions is the answer. “Different” could too easily become “unequal.” Who wants to end up teaching at under-funded schools crammed with under-prepared students?
Why not just use incentives to make our current universities value teaching?