Higher education, as a policy field, requires long-term thinking. It’s not just because universities themselves are pretty slow to effect change: it’s because it genuinely can take years for policies to have an impact. Want to improve research impact? You need to build new labs, hire new staff, perform research, do peer review, publish, do the knowledge mobilization, etc. Want to “double the pipeline” to get better computer science grads? That really means getting students to shift to heavier STEM course-loads back in grade 9, then get accepted into university, then graduate. That’s 9 years, minimum, before you see any real change.
Effective long-term policy-making requires that governments are able to make credible commitments; when they say something is going to happen, it has to happen. Otherwise, institutions will basically twiddle their thumbs and wait the government out. For precisely this reason, Ontario right now is the exact opposite of an effective higher education system. It’s not just because, since 2006, the Liberals have used higher ed mostly as a playground for electoral gimmickry (though that hasn’t helped); it also has to do with the fact that everybody in the province thinks the Liberals are done like dinner, and will be gone with a matter of months. Consequently, no one treats current policy initiatives (e.g., differentiation) as anything other than busywork, which will be binned the day after the election.
I can hear skeptics saying: so what? Governments have shelf-lives (except in Alberta), and when they’re done, they’re done, and policies change. But that doesn’t have to be the case. One of the things about societies with high-performing higher education systems – the Dutch, for instance – is that you don’t see a lot of violent lurches in higher education policy. There’s actually strong bipartisan support for long-term policies. Partly, this is a result of the electoral system, and the way it forces together coalition governments. But more importantly, parties realize that trying to use the education system as a wedge issue with which to score points against one another at election time is, in the long run, counterproductive.
Change wouldn’t be easy to achieve here in Canada; bipartisanship doesn’t come easy in Westminster systems. But it would help matters immensely, I think, if universities and colleges changed their lobbying techniques. Right now, the emphasis is always on being aligned with “the party of government”, whoever that happens to be. Over the past two decades, that’s been a successful recipe for getting governments to give the higher education lots of little treats every year, but it’s actually done very little to encourage long-term policy stability. The sector has won a lot of battles this way, but it never seems to win the war.
It’s time to change tack. The sector needs to start engaging political parties collectively, nudging political parties towards common policies that will survive changes of government, instead of getting them to compete against each other for the sector’s favour every four years. For government to be smarter, institutions need to change the way they play the game.
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Alex, you didn’t go far enough. Not only should the institutions engage as a group with the political parties, the institutions as a group should propose the policies that need to be adopted, regardless of party in power. You are absolutely right that collective action is the only way to “win the war.” However, that collective action needs to begin with a common grassroots voice. By doing that, the main point of discussion then changes from “what is each political party going to do if they’re elected?”, to instead “which political party going to do what we all agree must happen?” The 1962 McDonald Report in BC is a perfect example of this strategy, and it worked extremely well. Alberta’s 2003 Post-Secondary Learning Act is also an example bottom-up policy development that worked well (and the topic of my recent dissertation).
I also think you didn’t go far enough, but about something else:
If you want to double the number of compu-sci grads (your example), then you have the double the size of the faculty. That means having twice as many PhDs produced in this generation than the last. Since somebody has to train these PhDs, you need more PhDs produced a generation ago. Moreover, you have to convince people to dedicate their life’s work to a field, so it has to be stable from the get-go. Education policy — at least at the university level — should stress commitment over decades, not flexibility.
Actually, your example isn’t as strong as it could be, since there are PhDs in compu-sci that can be hired from industry. In something like (say) Arabic linguistics, it’s considerably harder to find a pool of doctors with strong and current skills, and therefore quite difficult to create or expand programs. We just ought to maintain strength everywhere, in keeping with the universalism implied by the word “university.”
Hi Sean. Thanks for writing.
Why do you have to double the number of faculty? Can’t there be any productivity increases?
In certain fields the student-teacher ratio has maxima, either because the marking is onerous (English, say) or because the pedagogy requires small classes (languages).
Being able to double the number of students with the same number of faculty would imply that half the faculty was previously redundant. I don’t particularly mind maintaining more faculty than is strictly necessary: it would be in keeping with the wider goal of maintaining strengths outside areas of market demand.