Good morning, all. This is the last week of the blog before summer begins. As usual, you’ll get my mid-year sign-off on Wednesday and my set of book reviews tomorrow. But today, I have two quick items to get off my chest (originally I had four, but I guess the other two will have to wait until September). To wit:

1) Bad Policy Incoming

As I noted back here, the Ministry of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, Canada (IRCC) has, though a decade of maximum irresponsibility on the part of the provinces, become the country’s de facto ministry of higher education despite section 93 of the Constitution and the fact that is being at best the fifth-most qualified ministry in Ottawa to act in this capacity. It is now starting to use this power in ways that threaten to re-shape higher education in this country in ways which do not make a lot of sense.

To recap: the Government of Canada is looking to reduce the number of post-graduate work visas it issues. By how much, nobody knows, but I’m hearing numbers between 30 and 50% (I have also heard 100%, but I’m fairly certain that’s just a negotiating position). That’s going to hurt Canadian post-secondary education, but, you know, fair enough. The number of visas issued is a uniquely federal issue, and it’s appropriate for them to adjust numbers as they see fit. Will it have a further negative impact on international student recruitment, thus further pushing certain institutions towards insolvency? You bet. But it’s definitely a call that’s within the proper federal ambit.

(To all of you folks who clamored for decades for a bigger federal role in higher education: now you’ve got what you want. How are you liking it so far?)

But now take a look (courtesy of Earl Blaney, a student immigration consultant) at the ideas IRCC is circulating about how to achieve this goal. One, they are talking about tacking on a Labour Market relevance test to the PGWP, and two they are talking about implementing both the cut and the new conditions immediately, with no grandfathering of existing international students. From a political standpoint, I suspect the latter is going to be the bigger issue: you’re talking about tens of thousands of international students who have spent tens of thousands of dollars to come to Canada and pursue permanent residence status: telling them that we have changed the rules midstream is likely to cause an enormous amount of anger (not to mention lawsuits). 

That said, I think the bigger issue here is the notion that PGWP will henceforth be restricted “based solely on occupations in shortage, and corresponding programs of study.” Strictly speaking, this isn’t a steer to educational institutions to only enroll students in certain programs, or worse a capping of international enrolment at a program level in order to obtain specific labour market outcomes, in the manner envisaged in Australia’s Draft International Education and Skills Strategic Framework. But I think it goes without saying that the measure would have an effect on students’ enrolment patterns away from any areas that are not included in the list of occupations in shortage. How big an effect this has on enrolment would depend a bit on how “in shortage” is defined (it is not at all clear from the consultation document what the government has in mind). Worst case scenario would be if it is defined as occupations which the Canadian Occupational Projection System projects to be in persistent shortage through to 2031, because that group of occupations only includes occupations related to health (tough for institutions to increase because of bottlenecks in clinical placements), coding/engineering (tough to increase because of competing demand from domestic students) and certain occupations in the building trades (tough to increase because apprenticeships are effectively closed to non-permanent residents). 

There are two other reasons why I think this measure is massively unwise. First of all, the track record of instruments like COPS in predicting shortages is pretty bad (anyone remember the mid-2010s when “university professors” were an occupation in chronic shortage? Good times). Different methodologies can give very different – if equally (im)plausible – projections and there are a host of factors which can complicate the prediction process. Like, there’s a reason that provinces tend not to rely on this stuff to make policy. Only a Ministry suffering from a deadly mixture of inexperience and hubris could possibly think this was a good idea.

But more to the point: why on earth do we think labour shortages are the right place to focus? What about, you know, talent? We could be using PGWP to attract high talent; instead, IRCC wants to use it to tamp down the price of labour in select fields. 

So disappointing. So Canadian.

2) The Future of the Exceptions

For various reasons, I have been thinking a lot lately about two specific faculties at Canadian universities: graduate studies and continuing education. Neither is a discipline, per se, and while they may have Deans, they have very different functions from those in other faculties (known somewhat derisively in some quarters, as I learned this week at the Canadian Association of Graduate Studies summer institute, as the “baronial faculties”). 

Continuing Education—sometimes known as extension—is the older of the two. In Canada, its origins lie in the early part of the twentieth century, when our institutions were starting to be influenced by American rather than British models. In the US, land grant institutions understood early on that they could not remain inwardly focused and expect to receive public support: ergo, the need to run courses for the public which spread knowledge but did not necessarily lead to degrees (as it happens, the practice of operating sports teams as a form of public entertainment stems from the same imperative). Graduate studies faculties, for the most part, are post-WWII inventions originally intended to protect and promote the status graduate studies and research back in the days when universities were overwhelmingly undergraduate institutions. 

Both faculties were consciously designed as “institutions within institutions,” meant to promote a different type of knowledge product across a range of different intellectual fields. As such they are the two faculties which—at least in theory—should be the most “corporate” in orientation; that is, the ones which identify the most closely with institution as a whole rather than a narrow disciplinary slice of it.

And yet…graduate studies faculties long ago ceased to have a determining voice in the arrangement of graduate programs—that drifted away to the “Baronial” faculties, leaving many (most?) graduate faculties mainly with the responsibility for dealing with students and their upkeep. Though the trend is more recent and less universal, many continuing education faculties have either been abolished or seen other faculties get into the game as quasi-competitors in the provision of non-degree programming. To some extent, I suspect this is an outcome of financial models in institutions which allow faculties to eat what they kill—in effect incentivizing each faculty to go off and create its own non-degree offerings (and duplicate all the sales machinery). But more broadly the fates of both sets of faculties are an expression of the ongoing power of disciplines vis-à-vis central authorities within Canadian universities.

As money dries up in post-secondary education, it is interesting to speculate what will happen here. Will these units become more important to the university and gain more power and responsibility, or less? The answer will tell us a lot about where power really lies in 21^st-Century Canadian universities.