Everyone seems very excited about the prospect of Canada becoming an associate member of the European Union (even though “associate member” is not an actual thing in any EU statute, but whatever), and in particular are talking about the value of greater student mobility since apparently Prime Minister Carney would like Canada to join the EU’s Erasmus scheme.
In the words of the world’s greatest living cartoonist, Aislin…”everybody take a valium”. Sure, everybody loves Erasmus in theory. Who could be against greater mobility? But when you get down to financial and administrative practicalities, it’s pretty clear that Canada’s accession to Erasmus will be both costly and administratively fraught.
Let’s start with the finances. The basic rule of Erasmus is that a student on exchange pays fees to their home university. If you’re a student from Greece (zero tuition) wanting to study in Canada (high tuition), this is a great deal. It will definitely increase demand for Canadian education in the EU. But going from Canada to Greece is not a deal at all – you’re still paying the same fees no matter what. Joining Erasmus might allow our students to access some relatively small travel bursaries, but it doesn’t really make their education abroad any cheaper.
Now think about the finances from the institutional side. Being in Erasmus means you have to accept Erasmus students for ZERO DOLLARS. Well, not quite, zero – there’s a complicated formula where Erasmus member countries pay money to the EU, which in turn pools money and sends it to “national coordinating bodies” (which in our case would likely end up being the Canadian Bureau of International Education), which then sends payments to every university that has students participating in the amount of €400 (roughly $640) for the first 100 students and €250 ($400) for every additional student. So, not zero, but functionally close to it – certainly well below the costs of educating a student, let alone the market value of an international student spot ($42,000 on average according to the most recent Statscan data).
So, from a Canadian perspective, Erasmus is basically a license for institutions to lose a crap-load of money.
(I’m told there are some folks on Carney’s team who are under the impression that Canada joining Erasmus would make institutions forgive the Liberals for taking away $10Billion/year in international student fees. I weep for my country).
But it’s not just that Erasmus membership will be financially painful for institutions. Canadian higher education and Canadian federalism are huge outliers to the European norm, and making the Canadian system legible to other countries is a much taller order than I suspect most people realize. And the main reason for that lies with credit transfer.
When Erasmus first started back in the 80s, it was understood that a semester or year-abroad is much less attractive if you can’t transfer credits. That’s why within a few years of Erasmus being set up, the continent’s universities began adopting the European Credit Transfer System (ECTS), which set up a single standard for awarding academic credit. It’s a pretty cool system (which I described back here) where credits are based on estimated student work required to complete the course rather than notional professor contact hours. Erasmus works because of ECTS. The single exception to this is/will be the UK, which has a different national credit system called the Credit Accumulation and Transfer Scheme (CATS, though it goes by a different name in Scotland). But even here, there is still a national system and a national convention about how to transfer those credits into ECTS.
Friends: not only does Canada not have a national credit system, a substantial number of our universities don’t even have a single internally-consistent definition of a credit. How is this going to work, exactly?
OK, our legendary incoherence wouldn’t stop Canada signing an Erasmus framework deal. Strictly speaking, every individual institution still has to sign up to Erasmus, and it’s the institution that has to come up with the credit-awarding/recognizing scheme. And that scheme has to be okayed by whatever the national delivery agency is (as I said, probably CBIE). Unfortunately, CBIE knows very little about credit transfer – that’s not its job. In fact, it’s not anyone’s job in Ottawa, really, because credit transfer is exclusively a provincial jurisdiction.
And here, folks, is where Canadian federalism comes in. The provinces are not going to be keen on a national body, appointed by the feds, to be pronouncing on institutional policies like credit transfer. Quebec, specifically, is not going to be keen on the idea of a national body, appointed by the feds, handing out money directly to institutions.
These are not insoluble problems. In Quebec, money could go to the province and then be sent on to institutions, similar to the way the Canada Foundation for Innovation currently works. A national body signing off on credit transfer schemes could be built in such a way as to take into account provincial views (I suppose, in theory, the Council of Ministers of Education itself could be the national authority rather than someone like CBIE, which might be an interesting way to revive the relevance of an institution whose public presence is currently near an all-time low).
But the point here is it’s an uphill slog. It’s a lot of work, at both the institutional and intergovernmental level. And for what? A program that will see institutions lose money while providing few financial benefits for Canadian students? I mean, yes, increased mobility and international exchange are valuable in and of themselves. But if we never thought those were important enough to spend time and money on before, why would we do so now?
(And this isn’t something that can be left to clean up after the agreement. The Government of Canada is going to have a lot of trouble signing a deal specifically on educational mobility without substantial up-front provincial involvement. Section 93 has consequences that can’t be wished away by the federal government’s jurisdiction over foreign affairs.)
Don’t get me wrong. I believe that coming up with our own national credit scheme would be a good thing in and of itself. It would bring at least a little bit of coherence to an often-incoherent system. It would force us to work together in unaccustomed ways for a common goal, something that happens all too infrequently in Canada. I personally would love to work on/contribute to/organize a project like that. But I’ve been around this game long enough to suspect that few provinces and institutions, when they see the actual work involved, will think the juice is worth the squeeze.
But if I’m wrong and you want to try something? Give us a shout.
