Just a quick one today, as the combination of a laptop failure and a MLS final in Seattle made the blog I had wanted to write impossible to finish.  It’s about a short but interesting piece that UBC professor Charles Menzies wrote for the Ubyssey a few weeks ago concerning the growth imperative of modern universities.  In it, he poses the question of why universities think they must grow in order to succeed and while he frames it in environmental terms, the subtext is pretty clearly that UBC – and public universities like it – should simply not accept more students.

What to make of this?

Menzies is right to note that public universities are on a treadmill of sorts – they have to keep growing just to stay in place financially.  But it’s worth thinking through why this is.  Fundamentally, higher education is a labour-intensive industry, and labour-intensive industries tend to be subject to Baumol’s cost disease – that is, that they tend to have stagnating productivity and therefore the costs of maintaining service at a particular level will tend to increase faster than overall inflation.  

Now, there’s nothing wrong with this in principle; inflation is an average, and the prices of some goods and services are naturally going to rise faster in some fields than in others.  But the problem is that if you have budget constraints – say, a government that won’t raise its contribution level – then you have to raise the bits you have control over (i.e. tuition revenue) much faster than inflation in order to keep pace.  And I don’t mean average tuition levels, I mean total aggregate tuition income.  And in places like British Columbia (most of Canada actually) where governments have rules to keep tuition levels from rising faster than inflation, the only way to increase total income to match the natural inflation from spending is to increase the student intake. 

In blunt terms, unless your combined increase in core operating funding plus tuition revenue at zero student number growth is inflation plus 1.5% or so, your choices are restricted to i) cuts in expenditure or ii) increases in student numbers.  The latter can be held down somewhat by taking in international students rather than domestic ones because they bring in more revenue and hence fewer are required in order to meet revenue targets, but them’s your choices.  And on the cuts side, because faculty pay and benefits are about 40% of total expenditures, it’s hard to imagine how you achieve this without hiring freezes and/or reductions in salaries. 

(Plus, you know, no growth, no increase in access to higher education – or in UBC’s case, access to elite higher education. That kind of matters, too.)

Now, I suppose you could argue that this is all pretty simple: just get the government to increase total funding (including domestic tuition) by inflation plus 1.5% every year.  But that hasn’t happened in over a decade and seems impossible to imagine now, at least without a significant change to tuition policy.  So, from an institutional perspective, the alternative to student number growth is real cuts to faculty expenditures.  Which, in Canada at least, never happens without a significant amount of institutional chaos.

Given all that, institutional bias towards continual growth is understandable; and even apart from staff hiring and remuneration growth still has considerable benefits (more access, better research).  While Menzies is right that there needs to be an ecological reckoning, at institutions we need to be clear-eyed about the economic reckoning, too.