Back in December, Ontario’s Auditor General released a “Value-for-Money” audit of York University.  It is…odd.  Almost disqualifyingly so.  If I were in charge of York’s comms, I would have ripped the AG a new one over nonsensical, utterly context-free “findings” and recommendations (obviously there are good reasons why no one puts me in charge of comms).   However, since I have no affiliation with York University at present, I am in a position to do the said ripping, because clearly someone needs to do it.  So here goes.

The report contains six main findings.  A couple of these seem to have half a point.  But fully four of them are nonsense.

1. “York has continued to offer many academic programs with low demand and enrolment, despite continued financial deficits”.

This “finding” is presented as self-evidently bad.  “Our review of undergraduate program enrolment found that York continued to deliver programs with low enrolments year after year, a major contributor to faculties operating in deficit positions” the reports says. And “across the university in 2023, 23% of undergraduate programs had 20 or fewer students enrolled”.

The AG’s Office seems to think that every program should post a profit (or at least a balance).  But there are a number of reasons – which should be obvious to anyone who actually understands universities – why this is not the case.  First, income is not primarily dependent on “program enrolment” (i.e. declared majors) – rather, it comes from tuition associated with course enrolment.  There are lots of examples of programs with few majors that nevertheless have significant enrolments (think language programs in particular).  Second, while income comes from courses, costs fundamentally lie in departments, because that’s where salary costs reside.  And this is a huge confound because individual professors often teach in more than one program.  Thus, equating “low enrolment” with “losing money” is dangerously simple-minded.  As indeed, the AG’s Office would have realized if it has read its own data properly: as the report’s Figures 10 and 11 clearly show, the faculty with the largest number of low-enrolment programs (“Liberal Arts and Professional Studies” – yes, that’s an actual Faculty name, and the level of York-specific idiosyncrasy involved is off the charts here) is the same one that has been the most “profitable” over the past five years.  

But look, that’s not the worst error here.  Quite simply, the entire purpose of a university is to find synergies across disciplines.  If that weren’t the case, we would just have free-standing schools of political science or Mechanical Engineering or whatever.  That means universities by definition are supposed to ignore purely program- or discipline-level considerations, particularly when it comes to finances.  Universities are supposed to cross-subsidize across disciplines: that is one of their central functions.  If the AG’s Office had suggested York be more deliberate and transparent in making such cross-subsidies, that would have been fair comment: to imply that cross-subsidies are in effect illegitimate is simply to reveal that the AG’s Office understands very little about how universities are supposed to work.

2. “York is exposed to the risk of tuition revenue decline, due to its reliance on tuition revenue from a limited number of countries (namely, China and India).”

Seriously?  I mean, it’s not wrong, but that’s not exactly something for which York can be held responsible, as the AG’s Office pretends.  Holy hell, for this statement to even half make sense, you have to ignore the fact that i) income from government has gone down by 15% in real terms over the past five years and ii) that domestic tuition fees have fallen 20% in real terms since 2019 and iii) that Indian and Chinese students make up the overwhelming majority of inter-continentally mobile students world.  As if this is a choice the institution made instead of a policy the institution was forced into by the provincial government. 

It’s just shocking to me that the AG would commit like this to a critique that makes it look so ridiculous.  And one that quite clearly is deflecting blame away from its actual source (Queen’s Park) for a very real problem.

3. York’s deferred maintenance backlog has left many of its buildings and infrastructure in increasingly poor condition.

Oh, come on.  I mean, yes, in theory this is within the institution’s control.  But given provincial funding (or lack thereof when it comes to capital), and cuts to domestic tuition, the only way it could have addressed this issue is by diverting money from academic programs and – in all probability – cutting some of them.  But the AG apparently does not have the intellectual fortitude to suggest what academic areas should have been cut in order to prioritize infrastructure.  As a result, this comes across as being more concerned with taking cheap shots at the people who make decisions rather than actually thinking through the alternatives and make recommendations accordingly.

4. An increase in size of senior administration despite stable enrolment and tuition revenue.

Much is made here about a “37% increase” in senior executive positions, which I suppose sounds more impressive than “12”, which is the actual number of new positions in question, and also of an increase in 48% in total compensation to these positions.  Now, I expect this kind of analysis from faculty associations, but I don’t expect it from the Auditor General.  Because it’s specious: most of the positions “added” to the ranks of VPs are not actually new positions, but rather reclassifications of existing ones.  Hence, most of the “scandalous” growth in top executive pay that the AG decries is not in fact additional pay – it’s just reclassified pay.  There are only three positions that appear to be genuinely new:  an AVP for Faculty (ie. Labour) Relations , an AVP for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion and an AVP Indigenous.  Again, the AG’s Office could have had the courage to make the case that one or more of these positions was unnecessary: I, for one, would have read that with interest. Instead, it chose the path of making a general smear about administrative bloat without suggesting alternatives.  This simply isn’t that clever.

(This, by the way, is a good place to mention how weaselly this report is in its selective use of comparators.  Where it is looking at institutional inputs and outputs, it makes comparisons – sometimes but not always fair ones – to other Ontario universities.  But comparisons are shockingly absent in any of the four areas above.  You’d never know from this that York is actually extremely average when it comes to having academic programs with falling enrolment and program cross-subsidization, exposure to drops in income from India/China, lots of deferred maintenance and a growing senior exec corps.  But for these items, suddenly the AG chooses not to employ comparisons.  I wonder why?)

In any event: this is a deeply flawed report.  Written with some strange, undeclared and to some degree unhinged views about how university finances work.  Written as if government policy doesn’t matter.  With dubious use of information from comparators.   One very definitely gets the impression that the AG is more concerned with coming up with “gotchas” to make the university look bad than it is in identifying systemic issues that affect universities. 

There are a lot of ways in which the provinces could use a strong, well-informed Auditor General to help make its universities better.  But first we need an Auditor General that actually understands universities and is prepared to look at issues systemically and contextually.  Currently, we appear to lack that.