I have noted over the years that there is a strain of thought in the humanities which absolutely revels in its own demise.  I call it “humanities disaster porn”, in which pretty much any tale of atrocities being committed on the humanities must be true because we can conceive of it being true. 

Remember the rumour about Japan closing down all humanities faculties that even big outlets like the Times Higher fell for?  That turned out, on a close read, to actually be a short request from the government to a fraction of the country’s institutions to think about reviewing programs in education and social sciences based on demand/demographic trends (i.e. the rumour was bollocks).  Or remember Martha Nussbaum in The New Republic reacting to a set of proposals (mostly later adopted) that the UK Research Excellence Framework would rate every scholar in the UK (wrong – the REF rates departments, not individuals), on their “short-term impact” (wrong – actually a 10-15 year period) on “only the crasser forms impact might take” (wrong – the actual proposal referred to “benefits to the economy, society, public policy, culture, or quality of life”)? 

These stories are quite often bollocks, but they serve a political purpose within the academy in that they help to create a collective identity based on martyrdom at the hands of cultural barbarians (who, almost by definition, are on the political right of centre).  And you can absolutely see this dynamic at work right now in the reaction to the Ontario government’s new Performance Based Funding system, which to a surprising degree has been: “OMG, those Tories want to kill humanities/fine Arts/social sciences programs and turn everyone into engineers.” 

The kernel of truth behind this line of attack is that one (1) of the ten (10) indicators in the Ontario government’s proposed list of indicators is about post-graduate salaries, and on the whole Engineering grads earn more than Arts grads (on any scale anyone’s measured so far, from about six months to ten years out, Engineering grads have something like a 40-50% wage premium).  In theory, if average salaries are weighted one dollar to one point, an engineering graduate will be worth something like 50% more than a humanities graduate and so everyone’s going to shift production to make more Engineering graduates, right? Right? 

Well, no.  Remember, under the current enrolment-weighted system, an undergraduate engineering student is already worth between 33% and 100% more than an undergraduate Arts student is (it varies because Arts students are worth more once they are out of first year, but overall, the gap per student is probably about 50%).  To create a pro-STEM or anti-Arts incentive relative to the current system, it has to favour the former by 50% or more.  So even if the new system were entirelybased on salaries (which it isn’t) the balance of incentives between Arts and Engineering students wouldn’t change from the status quo. In fact, the field of study that would really get dinged would be Science because it gets lots of money per student now but has a salary premium over Arts of only about 10%. 

So, if this indicator does not introduce any new pro-STEM incentive: what about the eight others we know about?  Let’s go through them.

Graduation Rate: You can check out graduation rates by the slightly weird definitions of “field of study” currently used in Ontario through a drop-down menu here; the rate for Engineering is higher than for Arts, but only by about ten percentage points (80% vs. 70%), so relative to the current system, a pure graduation rate measure works out better for Arts.

Employment Rate in Areas Closely/Partly Related to Field of Study: It’s hard to tell with this one because although this has been a question on the Ontario Graduate Survey, so far as I know this data has never been published by field of study.  Given that it’s a self-report, and graduates tend to understand, in ways that bureaucrats sometimes don’t, that skills learned in humanities programs are widely applicable, my guess is that there will be differences by fields of study, but probably not ones that give Engineering a lead of 50% or more. 

Percentage of Students in An Area of Institutional Strength Focus.  This is one of the seriously doofus-y indicators since every institution will game it by naming its largest faculties as their area of focus.  At most institutions this will favour Arts even more than the current system does.

The Famous “Measuring Skills” Indicator.  Wedon’t have all the details on this indicator.  But results from the pilot test of HEQCO’s PAWS study (which is probably pretty close to what we’ll end up getting) suggest that learning gain on the kinds of skills that are likelier to be tested are higher in Arts than in Engineering.  Absolute win for Arts on this one.

Number and Proportion of Students with Some Form if Experiential Learning: We don’t really know how this one is going to get defined or measured, but my guess is the proportion of Engineers with some experiential learning is probably more than 50% higher than in Arts.  However, this does not necessarily mean this indicator will lead to a pro-Engineering bias; more likely, it leads to institutions creating more experiential learning opportunities in Arts (which is a way cheaper option).

Of the six student-related indicators, then, none of them definitively introduce a pro-engineering or pro-STEM bias beyond what is currently in the system.  Now, what about the three “economic” indicators?  Well one of them – the famously dumber-than-a-bag-of-hammers “community impact” indicator – does not take the field of study into account at all and so by definition favours Arts when compared to the current system.  The other two are about research funding, and there, Arts won’t do well.  But a) for the indicator which deals with public research funding, the funds by definition will follow the same pattern as the tri-councils which means that proportionately, the distribution of research-related income will not change between fields of study and b) it’s not clear that getting more money for research in a particular area relative to others (which computer and life sciences clearly will from the “industry research” indicator) will actually lead to changes in student enrolment patterns.

Now, it’s hard to tell how exactly all of this shakes out because we don’t know if we have an envelope-based PBF system or a contract-based PBF system, or how each of these indicators will be scored, or how these scores will be weighted.  But on the basis of the evidence we have at the moment, it seems that we have two indicators which favour Arts over Engineering on an absolute basis, five others which vary from treating the two equally to having an engineering bias less than what is current in the system (and thus in practice would tilt incentives more towards Arts than is currently the case) and two others which have a STEM-bias but focus on research outputs and are unlikely to have much in the way of enrolment effects.

I’m calling it here: based on the information currently available the Ontario government’s proposed PBF system – relative to the present system – favours arts and humanities over STEM.  This may be deeply inconvenient both to those who want to stick it to the humanities and those whose identity is tied up in humanities martyrdom, but it’s the truth.