Morning all.  This is the last blog before my usual summer break.  Service should resume on Monday, August 31^st.  If you don’t hear from me then, check your spam box: often after I take a break, spam filters stop letting this e-mail through. 

One housekeeping note: the pandemic has played hell with everyone’s usual schedule and one thing that got bumped on our end (because we reckoned everyone was too busy to pay attention) was the  second edition of our Monitoring Trends in Academic Programs series, authored as usual by our Manager of Academic Program Analysis, Jonathan McQuarrie.  Our first edition, you’ll recall, looked at trends in the social sciences and the humanities.  In the second issue (available here), Jonathan looks at changes in Health Sciences programming, and in particular the way that the Health programs are intersecting with other disciplines both in Canada and around the world.  Do take a look (and if you’re interested in refreshing your lineup of academic programs, give us a call or email – we offer a number of services in this field)

Also: pandemic-related delays in data-production at Statistics Canada mean that this year’s edition of The State of Post-Secondary Education in Canada may also be delayed into October or November: there may be some work-arounds but they are time-consuming and tedious and I am not entirely sure I want to bother.  We’ll see.

Usually, I use these end-of-term pieces to do a look-back and look-forward, but that seems almost impossible today.  Who can remember what happened month, let alone January?  (Actually, January I remember – that was the PS 752 crash and the Alberta Performance-Based Funding announcement.  February is hazier.)  It has been an exhausting journey for all of us.  So many of you have been working so hard to keep our PSE institutions ticking over.  PSE staff are never going to be treated as “heroes” the way health sector workers are, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t been diligently working tremendously long hours to get us all through this crisis.  So, if no one else says it, allow me: thank you, thank you, thank you.  The dedication required to pull off the shift to remote teaching was incredible and well above the call of duty.

I’m still a little bit dubious about the fall.  Not so much about delivery – though I do worry a bit about whether online design is going to be i) engaging enough to prevent mass dropouts and ii) truly accessible to students with disabilities – but in terms of money.  Everyone is taking comfort over the number of international applications and acceptances being pretty close to historical levels at some (though not all) institutions, but we’re still a ways away from the deadlines for deferral requests and there’s a reasonable possibility we could lose a lot of students that way.  That could lead to some real budget shortfalls at some schools, particularly those which are very dependent on flows of international students in short-duration programs (you all know who you are). 

But even if it doesn’t, there is pressure building from provincial budgets.  On average, provinces seem to be borrowing somewhere between $1,500 and $2,500 for every resident this year in order to get through the pandemic – and that’s on top of whatever other deficits they may have (and ignoring whatever is needed to plug the enormous holes in municipal budgets).  In Ontario, for instance, we could be looking at a projected deficit in the $30 billion range.  Eventually, these are going to have to come back into balance.  Over the medium term, institutions can probably make that up by going deeper into the international student well – but as we have just seen, that’s leaving institutions to substantial risk. 

(The one thing I will say – and I don’t know if it has a hope in hell of coming true – is that one could at this juncture make a pretty good “Canada’s moment” pitch to governments.  All the other main anglophone countries are facing quite large cutbacks over the next few months.  There is a lot of talent which is potentially available to Canadian universities if we just manage to keep our budgets even.  If the feds were to come through with a One Big One Time Transfer (as I recommended back here) to ensure this doesn’t happen, then there is every chance that our institutions could pick up a number of excellent scholars from abroad, with all the ensuing academic and economic benefits that would bring.  Chances like this don’t come along too often – it would be great if we could take advantage of it.)

Now of course, you may say “Alex, why would any right-thinking institution go even harder on international students after everything we have been through”?  Fair question.  But there’s an iron triangle at work here: government money, institutional expenditures and student fees.  If you shrink that first line (which unavoidable to me everywhere in the short term), then either income from student fees must grow or institutional expenditures have to shrink.  So, unless you’re prepared to see cuts, or large increases in domestic tuition, the international route is about all you’ve got.  For better or for worse, we’re stuck with this dynamic until academia abandons the mindset that anything less than 2% annual growth is vicious, austerian neoliberalism. Which is why all those think-pieces about “post-COVID higher education” and all the new things we’ll be doing are fundamentally wrong: unless you fix the budget problems, there’s really not a lot of scope to do much differently than what we are doing.

That said, I suspect we’re going to see some significant changes in the way institutions are run.  A lot of services and operations currently run at the faculty level are likely to be centralized (no doubt amidst much kvetching from faculties, particularly Business faculties, who for some reason tend to believe that sharing services with the rest of the university is incredibly infra dig.)  And there is likely to be quite a lot of system re-design to reduce workloads, particularly in areas like finance, admissions & transfers (we’ve been doing a lot of work in the latter areas recently, and we Have Thoughts, if you’re interested in pursuing such a project).  At more ambitious institutions, it will involve academic program re-design to reduce the number of degree programs, in some ways similar to the way the University of Melbourne did a decade ago.  (note: this is not the same as cutting programs or program areas: it just means not every program ends up with a separate degree and accompanying idiosyncratic requirements).  And I suspect institutions will get a lot more serious about minimum class viable class and program sizes.

But as I was saying last Tuesday, there is huge energy going in to re-thinking programs and operations  Sure, most of it is about how to stay afloat in a pandemic, but smart institutions are going to find ways to harness this energy towards longer-term program re-design.  The key, as usual, is about engaging academic staff: they might need a few moments to catch their breath this fall, but they have shown this spring that they are an enormous reservoir of expertise and creativity.  Adjusting to the After Times isn’t going to be easy, but the sector going to get through it and probably be more resilient on the other side.

It’s time for a breather.  Take a break these next few weeks, if you can.  Re-charge those batteries, because there’s more hard work to come.  But amidst the whirlwind, remember that silver linings are everywhere.  Universities and colleges went through more change in the last few weeks than they had in the last two decades.  It turns out that change – even radical change – is possible.  Let’s not lose the moment.

Stay safe and see you August 31.