Yesterday, I discussed the mechanics of the Alberta 2030 report that McKinsey is producing.  Today, I want to talk about where the review seems to be heading.  One kind soul provided me with a briefing paper of a recent roundtable which highlights “Emerging Goals” that are coming out of the exercise.  Allow me to summarize:

The document suggests four “big goals” (Improve Access & Strengthen the Student Experience, Develop Skills for Jobs, Strengthen Innovation and Commercialization, Improve Internationalization) and two “enablers” (sustainable financing and governance).  Of the big goals, one (internationalization) is cribbed entirely from an earlier provincial exercise which reported in February, so we’re really only talking about three new goals.  And a surprising amount of them are, I argue, utterly banal.

Under Improve Access & the Student Experience, there are such amazing ideas as “promoting parity of esteem” among educational pathways, “expanding transfer opportunities”, and “ensuring support structures for all learners.”  Under Developing Skills, we are graced with luminescent thoughts such as “make sure students are prepared for careers”, “expand apprenticeships” and “Speed up new program approvals”.  Under Strengthening Innovation and Commercialization, we have such mind-expanding ideas as “Attracting World Class Faculty” (good luck doing that when the government keeps treating universities like parasites and delivering the largest budget cuts to the most research-intensive institution), and “support the commercialization of research”.

I am exaggerating the vapidity a bit, as there are some sensible action items under each of these sub-goals.  But there is literally nothing in here which is ground-breaking, or even that controversial (apart maybe from the apprenticeships, which seems like a nod to a set of dying resource extraction industries, but then I suppose most UCP policy is a nostalgia play for the resource boom of 2004-2014).  There’s absolutely no evidence in this strategy that the McKinsey Galaxy Brains (MGBs) have brought a single “best-practice” here from outside the country; most of these items in one way or another have been on the agenda for years.  I wager that had you put some student leaders and university/college Presidents in a room for a couple of days with some beer and pizza, they would have come up with a list of priorities which look almost identical to this.

This is costing $3.7 million.

Where it does start to get controversial is on those enabling items – finance and governance.  The finance piece contains some useful bits – the most important one being to change the unbelievably silly way the provincial government incorporates institutional spending (which, for some reason, is going under the clunky term of “deconsolidation”).  It also contains some ideas that sound good in principle but are unlikely to work very well in practice, such as funding back-office consolidation among institutions.  It re-iterates a previous promise to build a performance-based funding model (no surprise), but also suggests building a clear, transparent funding allocation model for the operation grant.  This is a great idea, but the NDP government spent quite a bit of money and time trying to do that, and what they discovered was that there really wasn’t any formula that didn’t massively reduce funding to rural colleges because they are – and I am not exaggerating here – by FAR the most generously-funded institutions in the country (I understand this review has come up with some numbers to suggest that this is not the case, but having done these comparisons myself for the Government of Manitoba a few years ago, I can tell you that whatever analysis they are using to get to that conclusion must be seriously torqued).  And since everything about the government’s last two sets of budget cuts was designed to spare rural colleges from serious damage – they are located, after all, in the governing party’s heartland – I have a hard time seeing this one going anywhere.

But the really tricky one is Recommendation 5.2.4 which, says: “Increase tuition flexibility and student aid: Deregulate tuition to allow institutions the discretion to set tuition levels for their programs and increase need-based financial aid to ensure that post-secondary is affordable for all Albertans“

Now one could read this as being in support of something along the lines of what the Australian Liberals proposed six years ago: that is, a full de-regulation of tuition backed by a generous loan program, and I suspect many will do so.  But there’s a huge distinction between “flexibility” and “full deregulation”, though perhaps not one that the MGBs would necessarily see, judging by the sloppiness of the wording here.  The wording might also mean something like deregulation for some programs (a policy which Alberta briefly adopted in 2015 right before the NDP took power), and higher but still regulated fees elsewhere.  Provided that is accompanied by much better financial assistance – specifically, much larger grants to poorer students – that’s an ok policy.  The devil is in the details.  And whoever is selling this is going to need more careful language to do so.

(How bad is Alberta’s student aid program, you ask?  Well, based on the Access to Information requests HESA filed last summer, in 2017-18 the average annual combined federal/provincial loan in Alberta is currently $11,874, the highest in the country.   The average grant is $2,186, with more than two-thirds of that coming from the feds.  Even with the federal aid, Alberta’s grants as a percentage of overall aid is the lowest in the country.  This, by the way, is a fully bipartisan failure: the previous NDP government could have fixed this but instead blew its money on a comparatively regressive tuition freeze.)

Anyways, on to governance, where the big idea seems to be…The California Model!  From what I can tell (this is not a paper but a set of power-point slides, and detail is necessarily skimpy), the idea would be to have four sectoral boards, one each for each of the public-sector types of institutions (research universities, undergraduate universities, polytechnics and community colleges), while allowing each to retain some kind of “advisory council”.  Yes, folks, the MGBs have scoured the earth for forward-thinking ideas on governance and apparently the best they can come up with is a joint-governing board model, first introduced over 60 years ago in California, and 50 years ago in Quebec.  Or, to put it another way, it may be that the signature policy of this review is to take the province back to the 1960s and put U Calgary under a “provincial” umbrella.

Did I mention this is costing $3.7 million?

I cannot for the life of me imagine how – given the Edmonton v. Calgary politics that plays such an important role in Alberta – this is ever going to fly.  I mean, I get it, it would be much easier for the government to deal with four governing boards than 20+, but what is convenient for government and what is good for institutions are two completely different things. 

Anyways, in sum: the emerging Alberta 2030 recommendations are for the most part banalities.  Not necessarily bad banalities – there are a lot of worthy ideas in there, just none which suggest any evidence of innovative thinking or actual learning from other jurisdictions.  But there are two obvious flashpoints, neither of which seems very promising ground for the government to launch fights.  

All for the low, low price of…well, you know.