Morning all. How was the summer? Mine was pretty good and included a whistle-stop tour of the top SEC schools (short version: Ole Miss in Oxford, MS is a treasure, U Alabama in Tuscaloosa is soulless and somewhat terrifying but if for some reason you find yourself there, eat at Dreamland BBQ).

Here at HESA Towers our team of nine (!) is getting ready for a massive semester.  Tomorrow we release our second annual State of Post-Secondary Education in Canada (and yes, there is one major bombshell in there).  Around Halowe’en, we’ll be releasing the first edition of our new quarterly publication Monitoring Trends in Academic Programs; some of you may know that for the last year and a half we’ve been helping institutions develop new academic programs and re-imagine old ones, but for everyone else you’ll be able to take a peek at the kind of work we’ve been doing in this space and hopefully it will help start some good conversations about curriculum in Canadian universities and colleges.  And finally, just before Christmas, we’ll be releasing World Higher Education 2019: Students, Institutions, Resources.  This is our attempt to extend the kinds of analyses done by the OECD for rich countries to cover the entire globe (or at least the world’s top 50 higher education systems).  It’s near and dear to my heart and HESA’s Jonathan Williams has been hard at work for most of the year making sure this is a top-notch publication and – hopefully – will be the global standard for comparative higher education statistics for years to come.

Anyways, school’s back, so let’s get cracking. Here’s what you may have missed over the summer:

• More chaos than usual in Ontario.

 We have a new minister (and hence a lot of new ministerial staff), a new Deputy Minister, and at least one Assistant Deputy Minister heading out the door. This no doubt complicates the task of delivering on a new Performance-based Funding system which, it turns out, has several unprecedented design features, not least of which is that it may be the first PBF in history to be designed as all-stick and no-carrot (I’ll have more to say on that in a week or so). Meanwhile, the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO), the agency which was quite clearly meant to be delivering the most complicated parts of the new PBF system (that is, skills measurement) has suddenly lost its President just as two next-most senior staff members decided to retire simultaneously. In other words, although Ontario needed experience and stability, it got the opposite.

If we were to play the prediction game, the good scenario is the PBF gets delayed because there’s no one to put it together properly; the bad scenario is that a PBF gets implemented on time, but it’s crap. Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst, is my advice.

• Red River College Makes a Terrible Decision.

In late July, it emerged that the Board of Red River College had decided not to renew the contract of its President, Paul Vogt. Almost no one on the planet thought this was a rational move: Vogt’s tenure has been pretty much flawless, and he has a lot of fans both inside and outside the college. So why did the Board do it? “The Board wanted to go in a different direction,” Board Chair Loren Cizyk told the Free Press in an email (he refused an actual interview, which always tells you something) before adding “great things are happening at the college!”, which begged the obvious question of why you’d want to can the guy in charge if that were true. The Board Chair went on to say a) that he wasn’t going to explain what the new direction consisted of, b) that we’d all learn about the new direction when we saw who they would be hiring next, and c) that the Board had no list of attributes or qualifications they wanted in a new President. Slap this set of statements so obviously contradictory together and one can only conclude that he was talking nonsense.

Suspicion therefore fell quickly on the provincial government led by well-known Costa Rican politician Brian Pallister, who in the words of Free Press columnist Dan Lett, “has a compulsive need to bully the boards of Crown corporations and agencies, a deep, almost visceral dislike of anyone associated with the NDP, and a capacity for vindictiveness that exceeds that of almost any of his predecessors”. Vogt, of course, was the head of the Manitoba public service under the Doer and Selinger (ergo NDP) governments, and people can put two and two together. The Premier claims he never called Cizyk about the matter, and I’m sure that’s true – that’s what political aides are for. Meanwhile, Red River gets to dangle for a year or so, and the question of what kind of candidates they’ll get for the Presidency now that everyone knows the position is held on the sufferance of local (or in this case Costa Rican) politicians, remains an open one.

• Alberta Girds for Cuts.

The new United Conservative Party (UCP) government in Alberta was elected in May but chose not to put a budget to the legislature this fall. It’s not a terrible idea for a new government to take its time to get its act together financially. But if the new government suddenly decides it needs to make cuts in the present fiscal year and waits until October to announce them, there’s going to be a lot of chaos.

Then, in late July, it emerged that the Alberta government was delaying the distribution of its Rutherford Scholarships – merit scholarships that make up about 60% of all non-repayable student aid in the province – from August to October or November. “We’re re-doing our systems,” they said. “They’ll be ready in late fall. No need to worry.” At a minimum this seems like really bad planning and communication. Who schedules a system overhaul for the exact time of year when service is most mission-critical? And why would anyone wait until the last week of July to tell your clients about it, and then make the announcement sotto voce, via universities’ websites rather than your own?

The optimistic scenario is that it’s all as advertised. The pessimistic scenario is that they’ve been told to stall until after the budget (and the federal election, I’d guess), so that they don’t spend all their money before cuts are announced. I’m not saying that’s how it’ll go down, necessarily, but having watched the UCP’s soulmates in Ontario for the last year, you’d have to be pretty naïve to assume that’s not at least within the realm of possibility. Like I said, chaos.

And that’s it, now you’re caught up. Now go have a great year and good luck to the new student executives kicking off their first school term in office. Excelsior!