If you missed yesterday’s blog, we’re spending the week talking about how to improve higher education in Canada by acting less complacently.  Now you’re up to speed. Onwards!

Let’s start our discussion of higher education improvement at the top of the food chain: provincial governments (if, for some reason, you think the top of the food chain is the federal government, feel free to spend some time perusing the blog archives).

Governments fund universities and colleges.  Apart from Ontario, they are the largest single source of funding.  And they represent the public.  It therefore makes sense that governments articulate goals for the system as a whole. 

It is remarkable how few actually do this. 

Oh, a lot of governments like telling individual institutions what to do.  In Alberta, Ministers think nothing of picking up the phone and telling Presidents what needs to happen.  In Manitoba, institutions can’t start a new program or close an old one without the say-so of the Minister and Treasury Board.  Ontario has multi-year agreements and British Columbia sends annual “letters of expectations” to its institutions.  These tools give ministers – and in some cases premiers – a great sense of control.  And politics, increasingly, is about control and preventing unexpected things from happening.

What’s much rarer is governments actually setting expectations for the sector as a whole (Alberta is a partial exception here because it does publish at least a few system goals  – albeit fairly unambitious ones – in its annual rolling three-year business plan).  There’s an obvious reason why this is true: underperformance at the level of an individual institution can be blamed on a President; underperformance for the system as a whole might get blamed on a government.  And God forbid there be any accountability.

But accountability is what makes systems better, so let’s think about what provincial governments should set goals for.  First, and most importantly, is system size and access.  Governments needs to set minimum goals for participation, not just in terms of numbers but also composition.  They need to set targets for participation of low-income students, Indigenous students, etc.  They should set some standards and goals around transfer credit.  And maybe most importantly, there needs to be goals around completion numbers and rates.  Governments need to keep track of these things and publish regularly on them.  If that task is too difficult, there might be reasons to team up through the Council of Ministers of Education or with Statistics Canada.

Though accessibility and affordability are very different concepts, they are linked, and so it is worth governments explaining their goals for both.  Affordability is not simply tuition, as some governments and the simpler ends of the student movement like to pretend.  It’s a complex relationship between tuition, subsidies and family income.  And governments should publish data on affordability: what they give out in loans and grants, what average debt is, and what students in different circumstances actually pay (we at HESA put out a possible model for this a few years ago in our paper The Many Prices of Knowledge).   Believe it or not, no one currently does this (Quebec and Saskatchewan are honorable partial exceptions), which is why provinces like Alberta get away with nonsensical claims about “affordability” because they have a tuition freeze, when in fact anyone who can read a policy manual knows that they are by far the most loan-based and hence debt-heavy system in the country. 

Governments also need to make sure graduates are employable.  Most governments publish some data about graduate outcomes every year or two (Newfoundland, Manitoba and Saskatchewan are the outliers here), but usually only over very short spaces of time after graduation.  Thanks to administrative data improvements at Statistics Canada, there are now options to do examinations over much longer periods of time, which is welcome.  But more pertinent questions on graduate quality both could and should be asked.  Employers need to be giving feedback on the system as a whole – are graduates today better/worse/the same as five years ago?  What new skills are needed that weren’t before? What skills are no longer needed?  This is information governments should be collecting and publishing on a system-wide basis.

Perhaps one of the most important things every government could do would be to establish goals around research, science and innovation.  Canadian provinces, for various historical reasons, have never gone down the European route of providing institutions with two separate envelopes for research and teaching; but the consequence here has been that institutions have more or less made research policy with no public input, resulting in a uniform move among institutions towards greater research intensity.  Maybe there is a case for this, but it’s not one that has ever been made publicly nor one that has ever been endorsed by governments.  Setting forth some actual expectations and goals for research and innovation would help to make more coherent provincial science policies.

Now, don’t take any of this to mean that governments should just start pulling numbers and policies out of random parts of their anatomy and imposing them on institutions.  That would be…unwise.  It takes time for provinces to develop real policy capacity in these areas and getting to the stage where they can steer systems intelligently will take a few years and require a lot of tough, honest discussions with institutions.  They could, however, take the first baby steps by actually collecting and publishing the necessary data on access, transfer, completion, affordability (i.e. student aid), employability and research.  All of them could do that right now, if they wanted. 

Oh, and one more thing:  goals and data are good, but accountability requires more.  Provinces need to start attaching performance-based criteria to institutional funding, like pretty much every other country in the OECD does.  No need necessarily to make the whole system output-based, but there need to be financial incentives in place to make sure the goals are being met.  Ontario made some extremely anemic moves in this direction a couple of years ago, and the rest of the country is nowhere.  If we’re serious about achieving goals, this is a necessary tool in the toolbox.

Tomorrow: getting serious about learning.