Canada is a vast and largely self-satisfied land.  And when it comes to higher education, we do pretty well.  Depending on the measure of access one chooses, we’re either above average or top of the pack.  We have the biggest and best-funded college system in the world, one which is highly regarded for its innovativeness.  On research, we punch at or above our weight.  Our faculty – the full-time ones, anyway – are the best-paid of any in the world (if you don’t count the US private system).  We don’t have an Ivy League, which means money is spread around widely, lots of students attend good schools, and we don’t have any of the pathologies around access to “top” institutions that the Americans, British, French or Japanese have.

So, what’s not to like about us?

Well, to be frank, it’s that most of these achievements haven’t come through wise system management.  They’ve come about either by happy accident or because we spend boatloads more money on higher education than do most countries.   There is nothing clever about our system.  It could be *so* much better in so many ways.  We are simply too complacent to make it any better.

Our governments fund inputs to institutions rather than outputs of graduates or research, long after pretty much every other country in the OECD has started paying institutions for results.  British Columbia and Ontario sort of set performance expectations for institutions, but not ones with particularly strenuous sanctions.  Broadly speaking, politicians in Canada don’t care what universities do, as long as they don’t cause trouble.  In good times that’s nice because institutions can do more or less as they please; but in bad times it means there’s nothing institutions can point to in order to say, “this is what we achieve for you”.

Our federal system creates inefficiencies, too.  Not because federalism is inherently inefficient – both Switzerland and Germany have found ways to productively co-ordinate the activities of both levels of government where higher education is concerned – but because we have allowed a culture to evolve where the federal government and the provinces simply don’t give a toss about one another.  So we have federal research funding policies that strain provincial government expenditures on institutions by not covering overhead costs, provincial policies on funding that affect hiring, which affects grant demand, etc. (to be fair, this is mostly a problem with respect to research – the two levels do work pretty well together on student aid, all things considered).

And those are the areas we’re doing well.  It gets worse from there.

Clearly, nobody cares about access, because if they did they would measure it, and nobody does, so draw your own conclusions.  Even when they have good ideas about access – like changing the student aid system – nobody bothers to set up a monitoring system to show who benefitted and what the impacts were.  Nobody really cares about international student mobility or someone by now would have bothered to measure impact in methodologically-valid terms (in Canada, our universities are *soooooo* committed to rigour in evidence that a letter from Frank McKenna in the Globe passes for actual proof that international experience matters.  Blech.)

Nobody gives a toss about innovation.  Governments like if it allows ministers to have hand-shaking opportunities with cool tech types; universities play along as long as it means they get more money for research infrastructure.  But is there a rigorous process for looking at what works?  A commitment to get better, more efficient, at all of this?  In your dreams.  That might require people to stop doing things they quite enjoy doing and that is simply not on.

Undergraduate learning?  Ha!  This is something we just assume happens.  And probably it does, but again, we have no way of knowing and no way of improving because our processes for quality measurement and improvement are in the dark ages.  That wouldn’t be so bad – most countries are in the dark ages on this one – if it weren’t so transparently obvious that very few people with a stake in the system want such a process to emerge.  To hear some academic leaders, all measurement is bad, more rigorous oversight is anti-academic freedom and everything is fine because…well, because these are universities we’re talking about.  How could anything be wrong?  

The common thread here, as you may have noticed, is a fundamental national fear of accountability which permeates the entire education system.  Governments don’t want to be accountable for outcomes concerning access or innovation (I might except the Government of Alberta on this, which for two decades now has actually published expected system-wide outcomes on at least some things).  Institutions mostly don’t want to be held accountable for outcomes on learning.  And so, we either keep things secret (good luck getting data on student borrowing out of our provincial governments), or we don’t measure them (access for low-income/Indigenous students, effects of international student mobility, learning outcomes, efficiency of CFREFs/CECRs/whatever).  Instead, we pretend that spending money on these things is, in and of itself, evidence of success and outcomes do not need to be measured.

This is the behaviour of a country which prefers comfortable mediocrity to genuine excellence.  It is not how serious countries think about education.   

I am not under any illusion that this situation is easily altered.  The Canadian taste for avoiding accountability is deeply culturally-rooted, and culture is the hardest thing to change.  But over the next few days, I am going to lay out some changes that all levels of government and every educational institution could – if it wanted to – take to make our system more accountable and more results-oriented.  To make it just plain better.

Should be a fun week (And I won’t be this ranty every day. Promise.)