Ok, a few last words before we all take off for Christmas.  This blog is going on break and will return on January 10^th. 

This was a hard year.  In some ways harder than 2020 because Jumping Jesus on a Pogo Stick this pandemic just doesn’t end, and even if vaccines have attenuated its impact quite a bit, certain governments in particular – Alberta and Ontario, I am looking at you – spent a large part of the year actively making things worse.  Omicron looks to extend the current level of hell a few months but not (knock on wood) make things radically worse.   But as we slowly imagine a post-COVID world, all the old challenges still remain.

Constraints have not gone away.  Governments seem reluctant to invest new money in post-secondary education.  Institutions tend to shy away from cost-controls and re-distributing funds to promote institutional effectiveness/efficiency except when faced with a major crisis.  The presence of ever more international students forestalls the crisis.  But I think we’re approaching the point where MOAR INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS is no longer a socially acceptable solution.  The externalities are rising, particularly with respect to the impacts on housing and, frankly, on Canada’s reputation as a good place for international students (fun fact from last week’s Ontario auditor general report: the Ontario college system is now 30% international students, and of those 30%, roughly a quarter are not being taught by colleges themselves, but by private career colleges through PPP agreements on dedicated sites in the Greater Toronto area.)  If growth is unsustainable, then at some point it ends.  Probably won’t be in 2022, but it’s not far off.  And that means a reckoning.

Some think they have seen the future in this year’s biggest higher education story, the Laurentian Bankruptcy.  I don’t think that’s true.  For the most part, Laurentian was (I think – I will have more on this after the break) a story of a series of really bad decisions rather than a problem of inadequate funding per se.  And if there is one thing the rest of Canadian post-secondary education has learned from Laurentian it’s not to be overoptimistic in assumptions about future revenue.  So, what we’re likely to see in the next few years, as we start closing in on the theoretical maxima for international student dollars, is an increasing drive to consolidate university operations in various ways. If the University of Alberta’s experience is any guide (and I suspect it is), then the main operational priority at larger institutions at least is going to be to find ways to rein in the decentralization of various activities and services. 

But in the longer run, institutions are going to need to re-connect with governments and make more persuasive cases about the benefits of education, and I can’t see how that’s going to happen without a major change in the way the sector lobbies.   The last two big waves of government funding increases – the mid-60s-to-early-70s and the early-to-mid-00s both accompanied large demographic bulges when there were worries that we would not have enough spaces to meet new demand.  In Canada, there is a coming demographic bulge in the late 20s to mid-30s, but it is unevenly distributed (to simplify only slightly, it’s confined to Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton and Toronto).  So maybe there are three provinces that might get on board, but not more. 

For there to be a genuine re-discovery of the value of post-secondary education, there needs to be a broader kind of re-alignment that encompasses inclusive growth, science, skills, and much closer relationships between higher education and employers (both public and private).  The sector can keep making the case about knowledge and prosperity, but I think it’s now relatively well understood in government that too often, these are just words (and sometimes numbers) that universities and colleges say to cover their own self-interest.  The case that needs to be made – and the coalition that needs to be built – is not one for institutions specifically but rather more broadly for knowledge-intensive but inclusive growth.  That means an agenda which is not institutionally-centric but which is growth-centric, and it means working with allies in many other fields to make this happen. 

I realize neither of these things comes easy to universities, but then neither does income stagnation.  Institutions only have a couple of years to rely on the crutch of ever-increasing international student dollars.  I’m pretty sure that, apart from a continuing regime of tiny cutbacks, this is the only alternative.  I hope 2022 will be the year institutions start moving in this direction; I know that here at the (growing) HESA Towers, we’ll be doing our small part to push the system in this direction.

But quite apart from that: thank you, readers, both for your interest and support, but also for having worked so hard to keep our institutions together in a very difficult year.  I am, as ever, awed by the dedication shown by so many to try to keep things working in the face of truly overwhelming circumstances for coming up on two years now.  Please: get some rest over the holidays.  Everyone deserves it.

Best from all of us at HESA Towers and see you in January.