Arguably the worst thing that has happened to western society over the past few decades has been the rise of cakeism. Though he hardly invented the idea, the doctrine is linked to former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, through his repeated use of the phrase “my policy on cake is pro-having it and pro-eating it”. Basically, it’s the ideology of pretending trade-offs never need to be made.
I’ve recently mentioned one example of cakeism in action, namely the proposal published in The Hub to wave a wand and pretend there is no difference between three and four-year undergraduate degrees. But we have almost endless examples. Within post-secondary education, another recent example is the new minister of education of Newfoundland and Labrador declaring a tuition freeze at Memorial University “until the institution can get its finances in order”. Since Memorial is $25 million in the hole thanks to the usual mix of government disinvestment, low tuition fees, and the Marc Miller effect, the Minister is effectively pretending that robbing the university of a few million dollars of income won’t have a negative effect on institutional finances. In the UK, the entire higher education finance system is based on a series of decisions by Tony Blair and David Cameron decision to spare parents from paying tuition fees, instead putting the onus for financing on graduates and their future income streams, which was very much a cakeist framing which has caused endless hassles ever since.
But look, cakeism is everywhere. I mean, just look at the last federal election, where every party competed to cut taxes/increase spending in the midst of threats from the US that were going to slow economic growth and require increases in national security spending. Nary a trade-off in sight. Politicians in Canada and many other countries have come to the conclusion – perhaps erroneously, perhaps not – that voters simply dislike trade-offs so it’s better not to make any. Once upon a time – in the mid-late 1990s when we finally got our fiscal house in order – Canada was pretty good at thinking about trade-offs. But it’s basically all been downhill since the turn of the century.
Now, if you wanted to put the shoe on the other foot, you could say that all politics is a bit cakeist. After all, loads of people ask for government money to fund their favourite cause or institution and never think too hard about where the money is coming from. So is it cakeist to ask for more money for universities and student aid? Well, sort of. But one expects stakeholder groups to be cakeist/selfish – they are pushing their set of priorities, and it’s not really their job to think through trade-offs. It’s the job of governments. And increasingly over the past decade or two, governments just forgot how to do that and started saying yes to more and more people.
But times are changing. Neither our federal nor our provincial governments are in particularly sound financial footing. Thanks to the Cheeto Chaos Agent in the White House, we are in for an extended period of economic dislocation and lowered growth prospects, not to mention a massive re-orientation of fiscal spending priorities to advantage national security. For the next half-decade at least, public resources are going to be much scarcer than they have been at any point before. We as a country, therefore, need to re-learn how to talk about trade-offs, and perhaps more importantly, how to talk in terms of efficiencies.
To take our own sector as an example: when asking the public for money, institutions are going to need to be a lot more explicit both about what immediate obvious benefits will accrue to the public or the government if the money arrives, as well as about immediate specific costs which will occur if the money does not arrive. That means “asks” are going to have to get a lot more specific: not “we would like $50 million please”, but “we would like $50 million please, which we will spend on X, Y and Z, and if we don’t get it we will need to cut A, B and C in order to fund these priorities, which means the community will lose L, M and N”. This may sound simple, but institutions going in this direction would be the biggest tonal shift in university government relations in my lifetime, because universities choke on the idea of doing less or being seen to do less. But this is what the language of trade-offs requires.
Similarly, institutions are going need to continually make the case that they are effective stewards of public money. The fact is that institutions need to prove that their receipt of public money passes some kind of opportunity cost test, and they also need to prove that they are capable of managing whatever funds they receive so as to maximize public benefits. And that means institutions have to earn a reputation of being lean and mean.
This is going to take some doing, particularly at universities, because most universities are pursuing so many not-quite-parallel goals simultaneously (teaching and research being the clearest example) that it is hard to trace dollars in a way that demonstrates efficiency in a straightforward way. But let me suggest some things that might get people’s attention:
- Reducing “non-classroom costs”. One way to do this is to make some showy cuts to top administrative jobs, as Memorial did last week when it cut four VP positions (this didn’t seem to help with the tuition freeze, though). Another would simply be to publish data on administrative costs and show how they are declining year-on-year (of course, that means making sure they actually are declining year-on-year).
- Driving program efficiencies. Nearly all universities could stand to take a really hard look at the structure of their programs and seeing where savings can be made, in particular by more aggressively enforcing minimum class sizes (which is for sure a faster route to efficiencies than program closures, though these are still sometimes necessary).
- Driving better outcomes. Remember efficiency is a ratio, the relationship between inputs and outputs. Track things like completion rates, satisfaction rates/net promoter scores and workplace outcomes much more aggressively than is now the case. Showcase relationships with employers who can talk about how much better your students have become, etc.
If an institution can show these kinds of things, it will be in good standing with the public and government. Maybe not enough to actually get money (opportunity costs and trade-offs still matter), but boy will they be in better shape than institutions that can’t do it.
In short: cakeism was and is terrible for Canadian politics and society, and the faster it disappears the better. But its (possible) departure means we actually have to grapple with trade-offs and be more mindful of the need to demonstrate both effectiveness and efficiency. The sooner the better.
