Yesterday, we discussed whether a university can have too many faculties (answer: yes, but just try reducing them and see how far you get).  Today, I thought I would ask a similar question about universities. 

It’s a familiar problem in many parts of Canada.  In Nova Scotia, arguments about whether there are “too many” institutions have been going on for almost a century.  Fifteen years ago, significant parts of BC went a bit bananas when the provincial government decided to double the number of universities in the province over the space of about five weeks.  Broadly speaking in Canada, all of the four big provinces plus Saskatchewan and Newfoundland have decided on having about one university per half million people, while the Maritimes provinces prefer keeping it to about one per 150,000 people (Manitoba is about half way between these two).  For the most part Maritime universities are small and not particularly research intensive while those in bigger provinces are larger and, on the whole, more expensive per student.  So what’s the difference, really?

Globally, you see similar numbers.  The US and the UK have similar numbers of public universities per head of population.  The big difference is that the US, in addition to its 600-odd public institutions, tacks on another over a thousand private not-for-profit 4-year institutions, which puts them closer as a country to Nova Scotia than to, say, Alberta or Ontario.  People do talk about there being “too many universities” in the US, but it is generally understood as a problem to be taken care of by the market rather than one where government takes the lead.

It happens abroad, too.  I work a fair bit in Romania and frequently hear that 38 public universities (plus a couple of dozen private ones) are too many for their population of roughly 19 million.  But many of these institutions are not what we in the west would necessarily call universities.  Under communist rule it was very fashionable to turn single faculties into individual universities, or “institutes”.  For instance, in Lithuania it was said proudly for many years that Soviet rule had increased the number of universities from 1 to 12 but really all they had done was split the one university into twelve “institutes” which were not more than what we would call “faculties”.  So, you get countries like Georgia, population 3.5 million, which has 18 public universities and another 20-odd private ones.  Wildly profligate, right?  Except that only about eight of those would be considered as universities here, and the rest would be “specialist’ institutions of one kind of another – so maybe not that different from Canada after all.   And per-student spending, even considering differences in exchange rate and GDP, are significantly lower in Georgia than here.  Which means: maybe the number of institutions isn’t really such a decisive determinant of costs?

Imagine you split up a Canadian university – the University of Saskatchewan, say – the way Romanians do.  Put core Arts and Sciences in one university, Engineering in another, Health Sciences in another, Ag/Vet in a fourth, and maybe Business/Econ as a fifth.  How much would this increase per student costs?    The direct per-student costs don’t change.  At the margin, you are increasing admin costs a bit (though this isn’t linear – there are economies of scale to be had, but past a certain size internal bureaucracy starts growing pretty quickly due to increased complexity and the need to maintain internal cohesion…have a look at the number of U of T administrators making over $100,000 some time to see what I mean).

That’s not to say that people haven’t tried to make higher education more efficient by reducing the number of institutions.  Heck, over the past three decades Nova Scotia has managed to eliminate its teacher’s college and fold two other universities into Dalhousie.  But none of these moves has had a noticeable effect on the cost of education, mainly because when you fold weak, failing institutions into healthy, wealthy ones, average instructional costs rise because stronger institutions tend to pay their staff more.  Such benefits as can be derived from mergers tend to be long-term and due to opportunities arising from bringing staff from allied disciplines together rather than from short-term cost reductions from reducing staff duplication.

Fundamentally, the discussion about the number of universities stems from a confusion about the purposes of a university system.  If cost efficiency in the public sphere is all you care about, then you would probably keep university numbers around to 1 per million citizens (which is about where it is in Toronto, for instance) and give students a choice of mega-universities offering roughly similar ranges of programming, albeit possibly at different prestige and price points.  But imagine if you had other goals for the system, such as diversity of institutional types, service to different geographical/ethnic/linguistic communities or even things like “choice” or “competition”.  Then you might come to a different conclusion about what the “right” number of universities is.

The real problem that we have in many countries (Canada and UK perhaps most prominently) is that governments simply cannot make up their minds with respect to the purposes of higher education.  When they are feeling flush and optimistic, they are all for competition and choice, which tends to jack up total costs a bit.  When they are feeling skint and bloody-minded (hi there, Alberta!), they angrily demand why institutions are duplicating programs and not acting single-mindedly to reduce program overlap and reduce costs.  The whiplash institutions feel with the rise and ebb of economic cycles is thus a feature, not a bug.

To return to the question: how many institutions are too many?  There is no simple answer without asking difficult and awkward questions about the purposes of higher education.  So the answer, more or less, is “however many are consistent with the provision of quality education”.  And if that weren’t a messy enough answer, remember that institutions are always free (in most places anyway) to supplement public funding with private funding.  That means that the answer to this question is – at least in part – “however many universities the market will bear”. 

In short: there are no easy answers.  In higher education, ‘tis ever thus.