Last week’s blogs (here and here) about the Alberta Vision 2030 plan seem to have been quite popular.  The one topic I received the most mail about was the governance piece and the idea of putting multiple institutions under a single Board, which seemed to confuse a lot of people.  So I thought I would take this morning to run a little class on what the many American experiments in system governance have to teach us (and make no mistake, the model currently under consideration is inspired by US examples).  

In the US, virtually every state has some kind of “Board” for public higher education institutions.  This document from the Education Commission of the States gives a pretty good overview of these models, but to summarize, there are two types of boards: those that are considered “co-ordinating boards” (mechanisms whereby relatively autonomous institutions figure out ways to play nicely together on things like, credit transfer and maybe doing some joint purchasing arrangements), and those that are considered “governing boards” (mechanisms which have significant budgetary power over institutions).  A state governing Board is sometimes co-incidental with a multi-campus institution (e.g. the University of California system), but not always (the University of Texas is a multi-institutional system much like UC, but the state co-ordinating Board also includes the A&M system, Texas Tech, Texas Southern, etc). 

Now, given how much the Government of Alberta already interferes in university and college policies (that’s an institutional observation, by no means restricted to the present government), I think that we can rule out the idea that what they are looking for is a “co-ordinating” board.  What they are looking for is a “governing” Board.  But not a single Board for all institutions; rather what they seem to be talking about is one Board per “sector”.  Stay with me here, because this gets a bit confusing.

Technically, the Alberta system has six sectors.  One of the sectors is comprised uniquely of the Banff Centre.  Another sector is the “independent” sector, made up of institutions which are not technically public but nevertheless receive public funding (these are mostly religious institutions, plus Concordia University of Edmonton, which used to be Lutheran but was secularized four years ago).  The other four sectors are: i) community colleges, ii) Polytechnics – i.e. NAIT and SAIT, iii) “undergraduate universities” – i.e. MacEwan, Mount Royal, the Alberta University of the Arts and iv) research universities – i.e. Alberta, Calgary, Lethbridge and Athabasca.  (I am unclear where the newest universities – Red Deer and Grande Prairie – are located: they should be in the undergraduate university category but the government website still lists them as community colleges, so it is a bit fuzzy).  What seems to be under consideration is the creation of four boards: one to govern each of these last four sectors.

Now, many states have single governing boards for the entire system.  This sounds odd to Canadians but makes more sense if you consider that Americans mostly think of 2-year colleges as gateways to four-year institutions rather than as separate institutions with distinct vocational/professional missions.  A smaller number of states – a dozen or so – have dual systems in which there are two boards: one for community colleges, and one for universities (New York also has two boards – one for the State of New York (SUNY) and one for the City of New York (CUNY) – but both of them take in both 2- and 4-year institutions). There is really only one Board which seems to work even vaguely the way Alberta seems to be contemplating; and that is California.

California’s model is world-famous: a three-part model in which there is one multi-institutional “research” university (that is, the University of California with its eight campuses, most of which are considered top-200 worldwide), one multi-institutional “comprehensive” university (that is, the California State universities) and the California Community Colleges (though since colleges in California are responsible to one of 72 districts which actually fund them, CCC is more “co-ordinating” than “governing”).  If you squint hard enough, you can make a rough analogy between the UCs and Alberta’s “research universities” and between the CSUs and a combination of Alberta’s “undergraduate universities” and “polytechnics”.  But the real question is: why would anyone want to?

The UCs did not start out as a set of independent institutions which then got retro-fitted into a common governance arrangement, as the Alberta 2030 system is suggesting: rather, it started out as a single multi-campus institution and grew along with the State.  The CSUs *did* start out as independent institutions (sort of), and only really got roped into a communal arrangement because the state needed a means to stop them from growing into independent institutions and competing with the UCs in offering doctoral degrees (a power the Government of Alberta already possesses). 

So, what’s the alleged benefit of having a single board for each sector?  Beats me.  It’s not administrative streamlining.  Remember: for the UC/CSU approach to work, you need some kind of full-time administrative structure at the top of the pyramid to make the “big” decisions: in fact, both of these organizations have “system Presidents” on top of individual institutional Presidents.   As a result, UC’s central governing offices eat about 3% of the total system-wide budget (see here for some interesting comparisons). 

Now, maybe – maaaybe – these you can get those costs back by getting component institutions to cut back on overlap.  But as Nova Scotia shows, you don’t need a joint governance system in order to do joint purchasing.  At the program level, a lot of the so-called overlap is not between research universities, each of which serves a geographically distinct region, but between research and undergraduate universities that occupy the same region (but since they will be under separate Boards, it’s not clear how any overlap disentanglement would work).  And while I suppose you could do a bit more mission differentiation between U of A and U of C, it’s not obvious that you need a joint Board and the extra bureaucracy it entails in order to achieve it: after all, the Dutch managed quite fine without it.  All you need is a dedicated public service that knows what it is doing (which Alberta has, last I checked).

And this brings us to a final point.  If this is all reasonably well known, why are the McKinsey Galaxy Brains (MGBs) proposing something this unnecessary?  Well according to one of my correspondents whose knowledge of the Alberta government I trust implicitly, the MGBs aren’t the originators of this particular idea.  Rather, it comes directly from the Premier’s office.  I am not in the know as to why they think this is such a great idea.  Charitably, they may believe that UC-like governance delivers UC-like results.  Less charitably, they may just want like a more streamlined method of yanking universities’ chains.

But you know, this seems like a big step to take without much informed debate.  I don’t know if the MGBs have an Issue Powerpoint backing this idea up (because despite this being a public consultation, all McKinsey documents are private and confidential and must on no account be given to the public), but I’d be willing to bet good money that it doesn’t cover alternatives, drawbacks and counterfactuals in any real depth because that’s not how the MGBs roll.  And that’s really a terrible way to make big, billion-dollar decisions.

Fortunately, the Government of Alberta still has several weeks to go before it makes a final call.  Hopefully, it will take the time to learn more about governance models and their strengths/weaknesses and to have a more profound discussion with institutions about what it wants to achieve and how best to achieve it.