Maybe the most childish thing about Canadian higher education policy debates is the recurring insistence on the part of some English Canadians that higher education needs to be more of a federal responsibility (i.e. the central government needs to take a more active role).  If you exclude the motivated reasoning of Ottawa-based higher ed groups who want more things to happen in Ottawa so that they themselves can have more interesting things to do, this position is mostly born of a simplistic and enormously wrong-headed notion that the federal government is the “more important” level of government and since higher education is very important (to them, at least), it is obvious that some kind of mis-alignment has occurred and can only be put right by uploading responsibilities.

(To be fair, there is also a less stupid rationale at play here which I’ll come to in a sec, but the above animates about 80% of it).

To anyone who thinks this way – and actually anyone who doesn’t but still finds the study of federal systems interesting – I can recommend a book which came out last fall entitled Higher Education in Federal Countries.  Written and edited by some of the biggest names in global higher education studies, it’s an uncommonly sharp book concerning the intersection of political structures and institutional outcomes. 

Nine countries each get a chapter in this book: Canada, the United States, Australia, Germany, Brazil, India, Mexico, the Russian Federation and China.  The last two are interesting in that Russia is formally federal but is in fact highly centralized, while China is not in the least bit federal but has decentralized considerable policy space to regional governments (most of which, to be fair, are much larger than Canada).  Two of the individual chapters stand out and are truly brilliant (the ones on the US and Russia), but they are all solid and I learned something from each one. The Canadian one by OISE’s Glen Jones and Christian Noumi is one of the best 50-page summaries of the Canadian system out there.  If you want to learn about systems in these countries: this is the best place to start.

The key chapter, of course, is the one which synthesises all the material, and it’s a very good one that should be read not just by higher education scholars but by scholars of federalism as well.  It is, frankly, astonishing how different these nine systems are: so much so that at times you wonder whether federalism is even particularly useful as an organizing concept.  But I think the authors do their work well: there are some useful similarities across the four richest countries in this groups (though they make a useful distinction between the three anglophone countries and their more liberal approach to government and economics and Germany with its social market economy).  Mexico, Brazil and India share some important features in that they are all large countries where historically local governments have been seen as brakes on modernization, either because they represent corrupt local interests or because they lack the state capacity to develop strong institutions like universities (the latter, arguably, is the lone non-silly argument for greater federal involvement in Canada – a number of our smaller provinces genuinely do have difficulties managing increasingly complex higher education systems).  And Russia and China are interesting edge cases: Russia for proving that not all “federations” act like federations (and can suffer the consequences of ignoring regional needs) and China for showing that a lack of a federal system can still co-exist with significant policy responsibility at a sub-national level (though whether that would work in countries where sub-national units don’t have an average size of 60 million people is an open question).

One of the things that comes across strongly, I think, is how good Canada’s system looks in comparative terms.  It’s not only that we have a rather diverse system, it’s also a very stable one.  The US has seen gradual encroachment of its federal government on higher ed not through any plan, but through the automatic process of state cuts to institutional grants being replaced by tuition and hence federal student aid.  In India, it’s been the other way around: federal neglect of education has led to states grabbing power and – in many cases – handing it over to the private sector.  In Australia, there has been a somewhat bizarre and somewhat less than 100% constitutionally kosher federal take-over of university-level education which has still left college-level education under the jurisdiction of the states, resulting in some weird and disjointed policy.  Brazil…well Brazil is just a mess, but that’s probably not federalism’s fault.  Compared to all of them, Canada appears to have a set of provincial systems which are coherent, stable, well-funded and where both levels of government more or less stay in their lane.  This is good.  We should pat ourselves on the back for it more often.

But we’re not perfect.  We could certainly learn a thing or two for Germany, which is superior to Canada in one very specific way: namely, it has formal mechanisms whereby the federal and länder governments regularly meet to co-ordinate policy in various fields, particularly research.  Canadian provinces would never do this (partly because the only things they dislike as much as the federal government are each other), but it’s a shame because it’s actually a good way both to raise the policy capacity of smaller governments as well as avoid some of the nonsense involved in science federalism.

Anyways: good book.  If you’re a higher ed nerd, you’ll enjoy it.  Bon weekend.