Thanks for sticking with me through my highly unofficial and deeply idiosyncratic history of Canadian PSE. I suppose if it doesn’t meet standards of historical inquiry, at least you all now have a pretty good sense of my priorities when it comes to understanding developments in Canadian higher education.

Looking back at the full sweep of Canadian PSE’s history, it’s worth thinking about the paths we didn’t take. From the first, we didn’t take the English route of having just a few elite residential colleges and three year degrees. At Confederation, there were already more universities in Canada than in England and by and large they were on the Scottish model not the English one. Most of Eastern Canada (which, forgive me, for these purposes includes Manitoba) did not take the Australian route of waiting for the state to create universities – instead, it followed the American route of having local religious and civic leaders take the lead in the creation of universities. In the three Western provinces and Newfoundland, though, it was the opposite, which is why higher education in these provinces has remained more state-led (and more Australia-like) than elsewhere. And in the 1960s, Quebec developed yet another conception of a higher education system which was part California and part France. So even though our educational institutions look roughly the same across the country, we essentially have three major types of higher education systems within the same country (this, incidentally, is why we tend to get ignored in big international higher education studies – it’s really hard to explain all this to outsiders without their eyes glazing over).

Maybe a more interesting question is why the America-like bits of the country (i.e. the Maritimes, Manitoba, Ontario and to some extent the Anglophone bits of Quebec) didn’t turn out more like the United States. There was certainly a point when they could have: in the 1920s and 1930s, major US philanthropies were very active in Canada., and no one made a nationalist hoo-haw about McGill and Toronto joining the American Association of Universities (a club of research-intensive institutions they remain a part of to this day). The eastern bits of the country at least could have become part of a trans-border system in much the same way that our hockey, baseball and soccer teams play in trans-border leagues.

That they did not is probably down to three things: first, our philanthropists were either not as rich or not as generous as American ones, so there was never a basis for an Ivy-League-like private system. Second, Ottawa was not as enthusiastic as Washington in ploughing money into science as part of the war effort in either WWI or WWII – as a result, our institutions lagged American ones by several decades in becoming research intensive. And third, though our provincial governments were a match for US states in forking over money to universities, with the partial exception of Quebec, the impulse to think of higher education in systemic terms or to develop dedicated and experienced bureaucracies to manage and steer education was never very strong. The result is a set of public institutions which are not only well-funded but also autonomous of the state to a degree unknown almost anywhere else in the world. In many ways this is a good thing, but it doesn’t half make our universities arrogant and unaccountable sometimes.

To a large extent, this was an inherent outcome of our federal system. But there are some specific features of our federal system that have contributed over the years to making our system what it is. A strong national presence in science and research is common in federal systems, but Canada’s specific lack of national co-ordinating bodies, which makes such investments less effective is not. Experimentation and variation of post-secondary forms is not uncommon in federal systems, but an almost total lack of systematic policy learning across jurisdictions (an outcome of relatively weak provincial co-ordinating structures) is not.

We see this play out in a slightly different way with colleges. I can think of no other country which has an institutional type which varies so much from one part of the country to another – depending on how you feel like classifying them, we have somewhere between three and six recognizably different types of institutions going under the same name. And yet there is a unifying theme: namely, that pretty much wherever you go, colleges are a large, important and distinct part of the post-secondary landscape. No other country spends as much on non-university tertiary education nor graduates as many students as we do. With essentially zero national guidance, and despite widely diverging institutional form, the country nevertheless converged on a model in which these accessible non-university institutions play a key role in vocational and professional education.

On the university side one of the homogenizing elements of the last couple of decades has been the relentless drive by nearly all institutions to become more research-intensive. Forty years ago, this drive was to a large extent led by American or American-educated professors who streamed north in the 60s and 70s to fill the teaching spots in our rapidly expanding system and who wanted to replicate the familiar systems an structures of the (mainly) US flagship universities they attended. Over the next two decades, this research ethos spread through the Canadian system mainly through increasingly stringent tenure/promotion criteria. When the next big burst of money came through a combination of new tuition dollars, new provincial grants in the late 90s to late 00s, a huge percentage of it was funneled into research-related activities, the better with which to pursue all those new federal research dollars which also started peaking at about the same time.

And this is the key thing to understand about modern Canadian higher education: over the past two decades, our universities did not pursue massification for the sake of widening participation. Fundamentally, they pursued it to skim money from the larger student intake and plough it into research. No one ever told universities to do this or gave them permission to do so. And it wasn’t a single discrete decision – you will search in vain in university archives for a meeting where it was decided to jam undergraduates into ever-larger first year classes so that professors could spend a greater fraction of their time on research. It was rather the result of an accretion of incentives, some from governments but the majority from inside the culture of North American academia. It is the logic which underpins almost the entire system, no matter where you are in Canada. And there is zero prospect of unwinding it.

What this speaks to, I think, is that Canadian post-secondary education is united by trends, themes and ethoses more than it is by formal structures. Look at our formal credit-transfer systems: outside Alberta and British Columbia, they are a joke. But if you actually look at how much transfer credit is given to students who switch institutions, you realise it doesn’t actually differ that much across the country. Somehow, people in institutions more or less make it work for students. Our universities and colleges basically do right by students even without clear guidance or rules. They make it work because they are filled with professionals who want to do what’s right.

Canada is sometimes called a country that works in practice but not in theory. I would argue that this is nowhere more true than in our post-secondary system. I hope this little historical jaunt has helped to explain a bit how that came to be.