Some of you have noted that I am a little hard on this country of ours and its higher education system(s).  That’s a fair comment: the sense of complacency around our education system and its alleged virtues does indeed drive me absolutely mental most days and I have no qualms venting about it. 

(Note to our international readers: the most important thing to know about Canada is that our national dress is fleece.  Because comfort trumps pretty much everything else.  Canadian policy-making is much easier to understand once you grasp this element of our psyche.)

It being our national holiday and all, I thought perhaps it would behoove me to be a bit more charitable.  So here goes:

Canada has one of the best systems of higher education in the world.  We don’t waste money on having tons of tiny little schools.  We have a fairly sensible balance between colleges and universities.  We have a relatively open access policy that gives people plenty of second and third chances.  And our scientific output is respectable if not world-beating.  Pick whatever indicator you want – access, retention, scientific output – we’re never at the very top, but we’re usually somewhere in the top third or so among all OECD countries, and that’s pretty good. 

There are really only a handful of other peoples whose systems you’d realistically want to trade places with.  The Dutch, maybe.  The Finns.  The Norwegians.  That’s about it.  Oh sure, there are some features of other countries’ systems we might like to cherry pick.  It’d be great to have the odd Ivy League school, or European-style apprenticeship system, as long as you didn’t have to take all the other baggage that goes with it (hundreds of overpriced, financially precarious liberal arts colleges and a socially-exclusionary secondary school streaming policy).

Ok, that’s my two paragraphs of charity.  Before we get too excited about these achievements, we should probably be honest about how we got here.  If we’re honest, it’s not because of any native genius or careful planning; rather, it’s because we spend a lot on higher education.  As a percentage of GDP, there are only a couple of other countries in the world (basically the US and Korea) who spend as much as we do, and the main reason we come out ahead of those two is that unlike them we’ve managed to keep pretty much all our money – public and private – inside the framework of public institutions.  Indeed, the surprise would be if we didn’t achieve all that given how much we collectively pay for it.

The problem is, the money isn’t there any more.  For reasons I’ll explore over the coming weeks, apart from BC and Alberta, our higher education system is almost certainly going to be dealing with declining income for the next few years.  We won’t be able to get by on dollars alone.  And that means that in order to continue our high level of performance, we really will need to start thinking a lot harder about efficiency and productivity in higher education. 

Culturally, this will require a major shift in Canadian higher education management.  How big?  Heck. we might even have to stop wearing fleece.