Fall and Rise

The question I am getting more often than any other these days is: “what are you hearing about cuts at colleges and universities?” And my answer for the most part has been: “damned if I know.”

The reason for my confusion is that publicly available details are few and far between. The HESA Towers team has been scouring the public record for details on institutional budget announcements; by our count, only 34 universities or colleges have so far announced anything concrete about their 25-26 budget plans and/or any planned cuts as a result of changing international student numbers. It’s possible more have been announced internally but just not caught the notice of the local press; we’ll be doing a lot more digging over the next couple of weeks. My guess is that many institutions are trying to avoid bad headlines by simply not going public about any plans to cut…but of course in the process, they are making it harder to convey to the public the magnitude of the downsizing being forced on the sector.

(This is a really interesting version of the Tragedy of the Commons!).

Some additional problems with the data: such information as one can glean from public sources is often skimpy and inconsistent: sometimes you get a figure for “loss of anticipated revenue,” sometimes you get a “projected deficit” (which sometimes is for 24-25, and other times for 25-26, and whether the figure is for operating budget or total budget take a bit of digging). Sometimes the numbers of programs being cut are announced but the identity of the programs is secret. Often you see that there will be budget cuts of $X million but there is no clarity about where those cuts will come from or the timeframe for the return to budget balance. In terms of job “cuts” as near as we can tell only five institutions have announced specific numbers for layoffs which have actually so far occurred, for a total of 214 lost jobs. You may have seen higher estimates from other sources, but these seem to include data on jobs which “will be affected” and it’s not 100% clear how many of these are permanent jobs which will be eliminated vs. permanent posts which will not be filled, or contract jobs which will not be renewed. All of these nuances may sound petty, but it’s really hard to get meaningful numbers unless you get this stuff right.

The story of how universities and colleges deal with the sudden loss of international student income (and the long-term consequences of provincial disinvestment) is the biggest and most consequential story in Canadian postsecondary education this century. How we deal with this collectively will shape the sector for over a decade, maybe even out to 2050. The HESA Towers team is working hard to document what is happening and help the sector make sense of fast-moving events and respond appropriately. So today I want to tell you about two initiatives we’re launching.

The first is a Retrenchment Watch, which will follow developments in institutional cutbacks not just in Canada, but around the world (albeit with a particular focus on the anglosphere). Higher education probably hit peak public funding around the globe over a decade ago, but what we’re now seeing is an actual contraction of the sector as a whole, happening via an un-coordinated set of decisions made by individual institutions according to local imperatives. Understanding how this is happening is of great importance, not just for posterity but for present-day decision makers. And we’ll be making this information freely available to all via Retrenchment Watch.

For the moment, the Retrenchment Watch is extremely bare bones, but we’ll be filling it out very quickly over the next few weeks, with the Canadian institutions first. If you want regular updates on who is cutting what as well as some basic pattern analysis, please fill out this form, and we’ll get you signed up to our newsletter so you’re always up-to-date.

The second is what we are calling “The Recovery Project.” We know that institutional leaders aren’t just thinking about surviving cuts, they’re also thinking about how to position their organizations to thrive in the aftermath. To help them, we’re launching a subscription research project looking at universities and colleges around the world who have faced serious financial sustainability problems over the past three decades and examining how they turned their fortunes around. In a crisis, there’s no time to re-invent the wheel: with this research institutions can understand better what works, when and why. By spreading the cost of research collectively across many institutions, we can offer this premium product—which involves monthly reports and webinar sessions for all members—at a huge discount to individual schools (and if your school is a member of the University Vice-President’s Network, we’ll be offering an even bigger discount).

If you’re interested in joining this project, my colleague Tiffany MacLennan has been working to bring this information together. Email her at tmaclennan@higheredstrategy.com and we’ll get back to you ASAP with a prospectus.

There’s no disguising how the sector is taking a beating right now. It will recover. The only question is how quickly, and which institutions will be at the forefront.