Though it passed mostly un-noticed south of 60, the Task Force on Northern Post-Secondary Education issued its final report at the end of March.  It’s worth taking a bit of time to examine and reflect on what it says.

Most of the report is concerned with the documentation of barriers to the growth of higher education in the North, as recounted through public consultations and a literature review.  And these challenges are substantial: the K-12 pipeline is much weaker than it is in more southern regions.  This does not just reduce the number of applicants for post-secondary education, it also increases the need for wrap-around supports for learners.  The cost to learners is significant – not just because of tuition, but because of the enormous cost of travel to major population centres (doubly or triply so if the learner has children) and the scarcity of temporary student housing available in those centres.  The alternative is distance-delivery of education, but it remains the case that such delivery models are typically more challenging for precisely those students with weaker academic backgrounds.  And then there is a variety of issues related to delivering education to a largely Indigenous student body.  How to design and deliver courses in an appropriate manner?  How to develop research programs which are designed to benefit Northern communities?   

These are all important questions.  But unfortunately, what is missing from the report is any kind of analysis of a) what education in the North already costs, b) what any new investments to address the many obvious areas of priority need might cost or c) – and this is the big one – how various institutions in different parts of the North might work together to lower costs.

In general, per-student costs in Northern Canada are between three and five times higher than in the south.  Partly, this is because the cost of living is higher in the North, and qualified staff is more expensive to attract and retain.  But mostly it is because populations in the North are small and widely dispersed, which means on average classes are substantially smaller than in the South, thus making them less cost-effective.  And so, while there is certainly a case to be made that the federal government has a responsibility to invest in higher education in the North – and believe me, the report leaves no stone unturned on that score – at a certain point it’s worth asking questions about cost-benefits, and more specifically which interventions might have the biggest impact in order to prioritize spending.

None of these topics was broached by the report.  Nor, was there any discussion of how northern-serving institutions might work together in order to reduce costs.  Possibly, there is not much scope for savings in this respect: different jurisdictions have different language groups to serve, the total number of satellite campuses probably wouldn’t change very much, etc.  But there are three northern jurisdictions each aiming to have their own universities (Yukon already has one, while the Northwest Territories and Nunavut are both committed to developing a university or a “polytechnic university” in the medium term). There is a fourth university being developed independently of territorial governments by Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami and the Mastercard Foundation. These institutions will collectively serve a population which is smaller than Prince Edward Island spread over a land-mass the size of India. Since most of the challenges around cost and delivery are common to all territories, you’d think that at least somewhere there might be room for a discussion of how to co-operate for mutual financial benefit.  But, sadly, no.

So in the end, I kind of wonder how useful this report is.  It’s very good at articulating problems with current arrangements, and even has a way – sort of – of identifying which of these areas are of higher and lower priority.  Basically, each government was asked to rate each challenge as a high, medium or low priority, but as you might imagine, many things get described as “high priority” so it’s not the most discriminating method of prioritization imaginable.  In the end, though, the main message is simply “the feds have to spend more money”.  

There may be good historical and economic reasons to phrase report recommendations in this way (political reasons as well, though these may look a little different for those populations depending on the nature of the treaty arrangements between the Canadian state and the local nations).  More of an emphasis on collective ways of approaching problems and defraying costs, though, would not have gone amiss.