About two-and-a-half years ago I (along with my colleague Ryan Dunn) wrote a piece called On the Brink, which considered the then-looming recession and its effects on universities. Looking back on it now, I think we were mostly correct, with two exceptions.

First, I think we overestimated most governments’ desire to stay out of the red. Clearly, as a country, we may not have learned the lessons of the early 1990s as well as we might: governments have proven more willing to borrow – and more willing to keep spending high, including on higher education – than we expected. That’s been good for universities and colleges so far, though the prospect of large and swift cuts may have been delayed, not avoided.

Second, we overestimated the likelihood that governments would turn to tuition fees as a way to supplement revenue in the manner they did in the 1990s. Governments are choosing to couch this in the language of “preserving accessibility,” though the research on accessibility suggests tuition caps do considerably less than is asked of them: basically, every piece of serious research on the subject conducted during the last decade has suggested that modest tuition increases have little effect on accessibility. Nevertheless, university is such a common factor of middle class life that raising fees is considered a tax hike on the middle class, and has similar political consequences. We see this phenomenon at work in many U.S. states as well as Canadian provinces.

This attitude encourages governments to think of universities essentially as utilities. For institutions that had their sights set on something more – “world-classness,” say – this is a significant, long-term, strategic problem, if and when government funding tapers off. For research-intensive institutions, it may even be the defining problem of the next decade.