I know, I know, you all want more on the ongoing omnishambles that is Ontario. You’re going to have to wait. What’s happening in Nova Scotia is probably more important in the long term (yes, really) and institutions across the country need to pay attention.
Normally, Nova Scotia universities are funded through a series of Memorandums of Understanding signed every three or four years or so. Objectives are agreed, and the universities get some planning certainty. This year, very suddenly at the start of February, the government signaled it was going to replace these multi-year agreements with a series of one-year agreements, a move which simultaneously deprived the institutions of planning certainty and provided a way for government to yank institutions’ chains more tightly on a continuous basis over the coming years. At a substantive level, the sector-wide settlement the government imposed was this:
- The government agreed to increase funding by 1% (i.e. substantially below inflation).
- The government put a 2% cap on domestic (i.e. Nova Scotia) students. Tuition for out-of-province domestic students is now unregulated.
- The government required institutions to raise international tuition to rise by 9% (except Dal and King’s which as near as I can tell had already done so).
- Operating grants to all institutions except Dalhousie were to rise 2%, subject to reaching an accord with the Ministry on a Strategic Alignment Proposal.
- Operating grants to Dalhousie were frozen, and then subject to a 2% holdback until a Strategic Alignment Proposal is agreed.
(If you’re thinking that Dal’s treatment this is one of those classic Canadian “let’s-cut-down-the-tallest-poppy” things, you are absolutely correct.)
Institutions were also required to each come up with:
- a plan to reduce “administrative costs” (no definition here, thus inviting all kinds of gaming) by 5% through “inter-university administrative initiatives.” Why exactly these reductions have to come this way rather than simple improved administration institutional level is unclear to me (and a little bit weird).
- a “long-term International Student Sustainability plan,” which seems to require some thinking about housing and impacts on communities (which is the province’s business) but also recruitment, support, and diversification of source countries (which are not even vaguely in the province’s wheelhouse).
On top of that, the government has decided that it is going to create systems of both “performance-based measurement” and “performance-based funding.” The distinction is critical. It’s not 100% clear what the distinction between these two are, but as near as I can tell, performance measurement will involve reporting on five “common outcomes”:
- Programs tailored to meet current and future economic and labour market needs
- Student well-being and mental health are supported
- Quick and efficient education of students
- Graduation of students and attachment to the workforce
- Research and innovation focused on achieving provincial priorities and advancing the public good
The good news is that the province is committed to working out individual performance metrics with each of the institutions with respect to their actual performance. The bad news is: how the hell do you measure performance on measures 1, 2, and 5? 3 and 4 you can measure through relatively simple time-to-completion and post-graduate work outcomes which can already be done through existing systems either at the institutional level, or through graduate monitoring systems run by the Maritime Provinces Higher Education Commission. But the others? It’s not difficult to come up with narratives which describe institutional activities in these areas, but coming up with actual “measurements”? I await developments, but I’m not optimistic.
Meanwhile there is the actual Performance-Based Funding. This seemingly has nothing to do with performance-based measurement, at least formally. What the government is suggesting here is in line with Alberta and Ontario, in the sense that performance-based funding is all stick (withholding of money due to institutions) and no carrot (offering new money as incentives, which is the opposite of the way literally everyone else in the world does it.) But it is very different in the sense that it is not going to withhold funds based on abstract, impersonal indicators, but on super-practical matters like:
- Withholding funds if health programs are not utilized at 97% or higher. The hold on grant funding for non-achievement of this goal will be 10% for Dalhousie and 3% for everyone else (yes, it is that stupid/vindictive)
- Whether the institution has bed spaces for 15% of their FTE enrolment or not (or has plans to meet this level); if not, the government may slap an enrolment cap on the institution. On top of this, Dalhousie and CBU are being hit with 10% holdbacks on grants unless they provide immediate evidence of plans to add 200 or 300 (respectively) student beds.
Well, now. One could say a lot about this: in particular that institutions might have a right to feel victimized that, having been told by government to act entrepreneurially and get money from non-government sources, have now been told “no, not like that” and penalized for success.
But look closer: I think something deeper is going on.
The Government of Nova Scotia is really saying that it wants to know that universities are on board with not just its long-term goals about knowledge and economic growth; it wants to know that universities are on board with extremely short-term priorities like having enough health care workers and housing costs. Forget the fact that provincial governments from one coast to the other are making health care shortages worse through a variety of budget decisions or have made housing crises worse over the past decade through terrible zoning decisions and NIMBY-ish inclinations. It’s all hands on deck now. The Government of Nova Scotia is letting it be known that it does not view universities as being separate from the state – that they are essentially utilities, subservient to the state.
I will leave it to others to discuss the implications for institutional autonomy over the long term. The point I would like to underline is something I discussed at a forum I attended in Halifax two weeks ago, with respect to how universities communicate with the public. Specifically, I mused: why is it that universities keep organizing their strategic plans around themes like “teaching” and “research” if what the public and government want to hear are things like “contributions to health care” and “keeping housing costs down”? If universities are public-serving institutions, why do they keep trying to summarize their achievements in terms that the public clearly think are second-tier priorities?
To be clear: I am not saying teaching and research are unimportant. I am saying that institutions seem to have forgotten how to phrase their interests in ways that the public think are relevant and important. They have, in a word, forgotten how to listen to the public. That, coupled with the unbridled hunt for international students in recent years, has seriously harmed many institutions’ social license to operate the way they would like to.
What Nova Scotia is attempting is not something any Canadian government has previously done. It is attempting to re-make the relationship between universities and the state. I have my doubts that it will actually accomplish this efficiently (the province’s Department of Advanced Education is almost certainly too understaffed to be able to simultaneously manage nine different negotiation processes in a sensible way). But I suspect it will not be the only province to try this.
The sector should be prepared. A first step would be to communicate less and listen more.
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I agree universities need to understand the ground has shifted a lot and current messaging does not resonate. There is little concern for quality as academics would define it. The utility comparison is apt. My feeling is many Canadians see universities as utilities, they buy from the local one and just care about cost and that it works. Any increase in utility costs is seen as a tax increase. With sub inflation increases in funding or tuition caps the only margin to adjust is quality. I expect we will see significant reductions in university rankings for Canadian schools, they will mostly become teaching focused institutions. Ontario is a case in point. I had no idea that college offered masters degrees. For sure they are cheaper than universities, so why pay university tuition? This feels like a second act of economic decline that will amplify our downward trajectory. Since there are so few Canadian companies doing R&D or tech based growth there is no external constituency for research universities already. As Canada’s world-class research universities shrink, or disappear, fewer tech companies will be created it will shrink even more. No one seems to remember that Argentina was once one of the richest countries in the world. Canada needs a dramatic course correction to be globally competitive that few seem interested in. Instead declining productivity is pushing us towards scarcity where we debate whether to cut universities or hospitals. We need serious political leadership like a Mulroney to turn things around, but we will probably get populist leadership instead. Research universities need to adjust so that they can find a constituency they serve to support them very soon.
I honestly agree with XB, most people do see, (including myself) see the university as a utility. It goes back to Ball State.
I also agree with XB. However, contrary to my namesake, I do not see universities only as utilities, although it would be unrealistic (and also maybe asking too much) to expect from our fellow citizens to see more than utilities in them. Nonetheless, universities are also the places where we push our limits of knowledge and understanding and creative skills, which in the long term is always beneficial for society at large, although, truth be told, I love to push the boundaries of knowledge and understanding for its own sake.
However, back to the basic problem at hand: the almost contemptuous treatment of universities in some provinces. I’m afraid there is a subconscious level here that goes beyond mere utility considerations. If you read many readers’ comments about the financial crisis of Ontario universities in national newspapers, there is a lot of open contempt for universities. Bashing universities seems to become quite popular lately. I am well aware that we always had to deal with people who envy and even hate universities, but in the olden days (at least as I remember it) they were mostly a source of pride and admiration. I don’t see much of that pride and admiration anymore.
On the utility aspect: Where would this take us if we follow through in a consequent manner?
We need more MDs and more nurses and more high school teachers in particular specializations, and although there does not seem to exist an acute shortness of accountants, the economy seems to be able to absorb any number of business graduates. So let’s suppose the Province provides operating grants only for colleges of medicine, nursing, business, and select programs in education. What do you say then to all those high school graduates who want to study history or philosophy or something else where there is no apparent direct connection to training for in-demand workers? Tell those high school graduates to become nurses or accountants or else – go away!? I don’t think any province can afford to treat the aspirations of a significant part of their youth with such contempt, nor could they afford to lose them all.
Notwithstanding, we have to deal with the situation at hand, and that means we have to run our institutions with more business acumen than most of us like. It has become an ever more painful stretching exercise to serve the needs of our students, while trying to convince provincial governments to fund us, while at the same time trying to generate more revenue from tuition to make up for cuts to provincial grants.
“…institutions… have, in a word, forgotten how to listen to the public….”
I hope every university faculty member, department, senate and administration in the country reads your post.
This ‘depleting social license’ issue feels like a planet-sized iceberg. Perhaps this is more so a depletion of urban, university autonomy?
I.e. perhaps northern, rural and/or vocational schools have always had to focus (cater?) more towards community or government interests and the labour market, and universities are being pulled in that direction. Slowly and then all at once (in this case).
To follow up on Eric’s note, above, “depleting social license” was the cause of the creation of universities in the first place. Hence, the riot in Oxford on St. Scholastica day 1298, and the Paris university strike of 1229.
Secondly, I think a great deal of the problem is that universities have, in (say) the postwar period, lobbied for their social license to operate, or at least for funding, in terms of their practical utility: they spend lots of money in town; they produce workers for vital public services; they might invent something useful, or provide studies of social issues. The world is wising up to the fact that all of these things could be done by other institutions, at lower cost and more directly. And again, this is long-standing: the archbishop of Paris tried to ban the teaching of Aristotle, presumably because it wouldn’t produce the sorts of orthodox clerks the church needed.
What universities have to argue isn’t that they’re meeting government demands precisely, but that the life of the mind is worthy of support in itself, that it isn’t reducible to a service. Maybe they could talk about how, say, a world expert on medieval magic can be a soldier’s son from Lunenburg, or how a guy from Liverpool can become a great poet, or an indigenous guy can become a lawyer and radio-host. They were all in my class, as an undergrad in Nova Scotia.