The last federal budget was, as I noted at the time, a freaking disaster for post-secondary education, and a vivid warning to Government Relations that the arguments that the system – well, universities anyway – had hitherto relied upon were simply not working anymore and that a re-think was required.  Judging by the twitter convos I keep an eye on, I think this lesson is starting to penetrate, in the sense that people are recognizing that simply pointing at Israel or South Korea and saying: “look at what percentage of GDP these guys devote to R&D!” and hoping to shame Ottawa into action is not working.  I also get the sense that people realize that the whole “research $ for institutions -> an innovation miracle occurs -> good jobs and middle-class prosperity” argument relies too much on some frantic hand-waving about a couple of superstar scientists and one or two useful new technologies to be persuasive.   Simply pointing at pictures of Yoshua Bengio (or whoever) and yelling “look, innovation!” (which has more or less been the U-15/Universities Canada strategy for the last two decades) has to stop.

Outside the ambit of U-15/Universities Canada, I am starting to see some coalescence within the community around shifting the argument from “granting council monies magically create innovation/growth via superstar academics” to “granting council monies are a really important way to training future scientific talent”, which is much closer to the truth.  The logical sequence “research $ for institutions -> Canada is a great place to develop talent -> good jobs and middle-class prosperity” is, I think, slowly going to be replace the more tired “research $ for institutions -> an innovation miracle occurs -> good jobs and middle-class prosperity”.

BUT.

But, but, but.

A shift in argument is not enough.  There actually has to be a shift in process and output as well.  We’re not getting more moolah just to do what we have been doing for decades.   That is to say, I am pretty sure universities can make an argument about the benefits of research via training, but that doesn’t mean anyone is necessarily going to fund it unless the university community is actually offering to change something.  There is no quid without a quo.

(Side note: the eight most dangerous words in higher education are “we’ve just got to tell our story better” because it implies that better comms are more important than actually doing better.)

Bluntly, we can change up the argument to make it about talent, and particularly talent at the doctoral level, but unless universities change their doctoral programs to make sure they actually focus on talent, and do so in an efficient and effective manner, it’s unlikely government will reward institutions for this.  The problem is that graduate studies in Canada are an almighty mess.  We actually don’t do a very good job of developing talent this way, or at least not in a way which doesn’t waste vast amounts of money, time and, yes, talent.

Consider that in Europe, typical time to a PhD is 3-4 years.  In Canada, we do not know a great deal about average time to completion (because no one collects data, because no one wants to take responsibility for what they know would be an utter nightmare), but the median is probably somewhere between 5 and 6 years and the mean a bit higher than that.  Why?  What does Canada get out of those two extra years?  Are our PhDs better than theirs?  If Europe can get grad students through similar programs faster, why can’t we?  Why must we invest so much extra public money?

The answers here are complicated, and some of what I am about to explain varies a bit by field of study, but basically there are four reasons why Canadian doctoral students take longer to finish. 

One of them is comps: these for the most part don’t exist in Europe, at least not at the start of PhD programs.  The idea is to ensure students have “breadth” in their field before they start in on actual research; European programs either assume the master’s degree has already given students this depth or they simply don’t care because the PhD is only meant to signify research prowess. 

The second is that, in North America, grad students get used as auxiliary staff to teach classes and run laboratories: basically, institutions have a financial interest in making programs longer in order to keep cheap labour around. 

Third is that Canada simply does not organize graduate programs nearly as well as Europe.  In many (not all) disciplines, we run grad “programs” as more a series of apprenticeships, individualized to the proclivities of each professor, so the nature of graduate “training” ends up being a function of individual professorial proclivities rather than an experience truly organized collectively by a department.  For some students this works out ok, for others – who find themselves tied to a professor who doesn’t answer emails, is overburdened with other projects of their own, etc – this can be a nightmare. 

And then fourth, students often have to work a lot outside of their education to fund their degrees, in part because the combination of the previous three factors often means they cannot finish during the time their normal funding (not huge to begin with) lasts and so need to spend more of their time working.

And we expect the public to pay more for this mess?

Allow me to suggest that the case for increased basic research funding would be enormously strengthened if universities offered something concrete in return.  Namely: a sweeping revamp of graduate programs to make them more efficient. 

For example: what’s the value of comps?  Perhaps we could blow those up, or – if you think they are important for teaching purposes – stick them at the end of a graduate program closer to the time when someone might end up actually teaching professionally.  This is effectively how much of Eastern Europe does things, splitting doctoral programs as they do into a “candidat nauk” phase (a doctoral degree which denotes research ability” and a “doctor nauk” (or in Germany, “Habilitation”) which denotes the capacity to teach at a university level.  That way, the 60-80% of people who are not going on to Academia could get a piece of paper denoting their research ability and skip the stuff with respect to teaching which they aren’t going to use anyway.  Saves everyone a year or two.  It would deprive universities of cheap teaching resources, but if you ask me that’s a feature not a bug.

Obviously the value of, and stress laid upon, comps varies from one program to another.  There probably isn’t a one-size-fits all solution here.  But that’s not really the point.  Our graduate programs are designed to train academics.  But it’s been 40 or 50 years since academia was the main destination for graduate students.  Why not, as part of a push for better funding, take the time to re-make graduate programs for the modern age?  That is to say, make them shorter and more pertinent to non-academic destinations.  Keep an extra year or two at the end for people wanting to be profs, maybe, but just in general make them faster, outcomes-focused and for God’s sake end the apprenticeship system – make graduate students’ progress the responsibility of the entire department not a single prof.

In short: yes, by all means, let’s make the case for research in terms of churning out more and better PhDs who can use their training to help the general economy grow.  But the case for increased investment is also a case for reform; we should not pretend that our present system does this very effectively.  If the case for increased investment in research rests on the training of future researchers, then let’s get serious about the actual training.  The quid pro quo is simple. More money, yes.  But also a reform of graduate programs on a massive scale.  In the long run, it’s what’s best for the country, its universities and – above all – it’s good for graduate students.