One of the things I often hear in Canada is that we have “too many universities” or “too many colleges” and that we would all be better off if we just got rid of a few of them. In fact, according to my little birds, this view now also seems to be orthodoxy in the Ontario Ministry of Colleges and Universities, which doesn’t want to see another Laurentian (once is careless, twice looks like incompetence) but at the same time doesn’t want to take the institutions off a starvation diet, either.

There is a grain of truth to this view, but only a grain. Mostly though, it’s nonsense.

The grain of truth is that Canada (well I say Canada but it’s mainly Ontario) has a lot of what one might call micro-degree-granting sub-institutions, most of which have some kind of religious affiliation. I’m thinking here of King’s and Huron at Western; Trinity, St. Michael’s and Victoria at U of T, St Jerome’s at Waterloo, St. Thomas More at U Saskatchewan, etc. These and others exist inside larger institutions and yet still maintain a certain separateness which may provide some distinctive programming, but which also add some bureaucratic costs as they need to maintain their own registrarial and financial staff for instance. The question is, do these institutions deliver value for money or should they be absorbed into the larger institutions with which they are connected?

I don’t think there is a single answer to this question. In the last four years we have already seen situations where the individual micro-institution has hit the wall and asked to be absorbed by the larger institutions (Brescia at Western) and situations where the “parent” institution has told the federated institutions to take a hike because it feels they are a financial burden (Sudbury, Thornloe, and Huntington at Laurentian). I think there is a reasonable chance that we will see more of these institutions disappear, but undoubtedly some will survive. For instance, Victoria University at the University of Toronto won’t disappear for the simple reason that it owns a sizable chunk of Bloor Street and therefore has a very healthy income stream that will allow it to continue when others cannot. 

(The other micro-institutions in Ontario that are likely to get wrapped up shortly are the two francophone institutions—Université Hearst and l’Université de l’Ontario Français—neither of which make a lick of financial sense on their own, and will probably get absorbed into the University of Ottawa somehow, along the lines I described in the blog last fall.)

But non-micro institutions, ones that don’t already share a campus? That’s a very different proposition. Among these institutions, the case for mergers is almost non-existent, and its continued existence is due to a weird Canadian fetish for gigantism in higher education.

Once you eliminate all those micro-institutions discussed above, the average institution in Canada is substantially larger than in any other country in the developed world with the possible exception of Australia (this is particularly true in the college sector…one of the reasons Canadian colleges are so good is that in most parts of the country they have achieved a quite uncommon level of scale). We like big. We think big is good and small is bad. This is why, when it became obvious a few years ago that Ontario needed more campuses, that the provincial government insisted that any new institutions be “campuses” of existing institutions rather than new institutions in their own right. Because economies of scale > new institutions, even if new institutions offer possibilities of new ideas, new processes, more flexibility etc. And then we whine about institutional homogeneity. 

Anyways, the Ontario government seems to believe that this same logic applies to mergers: bigger institutions are better institutions, and local control doesn’t really matter. Various sources tell me that the provincial government is encouraging institutions to look at all sorts of tie-ups, including ones involving one institution in the GTA and one in Northern Ontario. 

This is—and I am choosing my words extremely carefully here—absolutely batshit crazy. 

The international literature on mergers is unambiguous. Mergers work if and only if the institutions have a) contiguous campuses which b) offer complimentary programs, not overlapping ones. Where institutions are far away, it is difficult to merge services and very difficult to create a unified institutional culture. Where they offer overlapping programs, the act of trying to merge two institutions takes up an enormous amount of management time and energy. And these costs are on top of the obvious ones (e.g. merging IT services is anything but costless, and if faculty and staff pay is different across the two institutions, it will harmonize at the higher level, not the lower one, etc.). In these situations, the only way costs decrease is if you close one of the campuses. And that is so politically fraught, it’s hard to imagine a provincial government permitting it.

Does Canada have examples of institutions in such situations? Well, it used to: Dalhousie, for instance, managed to absorb the Technical University of Nova Scotia in the 90s and the Nova Scotia Agricultural College in the 10s. I think I would argue that we really only have two genuinely contiguous campuses: Dalhousie/King’s and UNB/St. Thomas and these institutional pairings already share a lot of costs and services, such that actual savings from a merger would not be that great. At a stretch you could include Waterloo/Laurier and Dalhousie/SMU as well, but the level of program overlap in these pairings is high enough that it should give everyone pause. In other words, it’s not obvious that we have any realistic candidates for successful mergers.

(The country’s four art universities—NSCAD, OCAD U, Alberta University of the Arts and Emily Carr—possibly form an exception here because they have distinct programming which might even improve if there was more cross-pollination with other fields of study such as those in big comprehensive universities. Each also has at least one nearby larger institution with which it could enter some kind of tie-up. But it’s not clear to me that any of those larger institutions would be interested in a tie-up because it would likely be quite expensive. My guess is that in a couple of cases we will see closer affiliations that don’t amount to full mergers, but that’s it.)

Canada’s real challenge is geography. We have a lot of small colleges and universities in some obscure places. Places that, if the market were left to rule unfettered, would probably not have colleges and universities. Northern BC and northern Ontario are absolutely littered with institutions that make no financial sense, but which previous governments have created and sustained in order to support local communities. Which is what public subsidies are meant to do. But now what is happening—in Ontario at least—is that governments don’t want to subsidize these remote institutions directly and are hoping that they can bully institutions in the GTA to subsidize them indirectly, instead.

There’s a reason we have small local colleges: it’s to serve local needs. If you pursue the logic that fewer institutions always leads to greater efficiency, and the needs of the people of Northern Ontario can be run directly from suburban areas, why have any individual colleges at all? Why not just jam every single college in Ontario into a single, province-wide organization, the way New Zealand merged all its colleges into a single entity in 2019? 

Oh, right, because that was an unmitigated disaster. Cost-overruns, loss of local voice, you name it. Mergers have costs and most of them aren’t worth paying.

In short: there are some small institutions that are probably going to disappear in the next year or two. But they are the kind of institutions that not everyone understood were independent in the first place. As for independent institutions, there are very few cases where mergers plausibly lead to lower costs without politically damaging campus closures.

Tl;dr – We have real problems to solve. Where cost reductions are concerned, mergers are for the most part a side-show, an irrelevance. Let’s not waste time on them.