Institutions always claim to be underfunded.  Seriously, I’ve been at universities in maybe 25 countries – including Saudi Arabia and the Emirates – and I have yet to find an institution that thought it was overfunded.  The reason for this is simple: there’s always just a little bit more quality around the bend, if only you could buy it (the university down the street has a space-shuttle simulator? We need an actual space shuttle to stay competitive!).  So it’s easy to tune out this kind of talk.

The slightly more sophisticated argument is one of relative underfunding.  That is too say: institution A is getting less than it “should” based on what a selection of other comparable institutions get.  The trick, of course, is to get the comparator right – too often, it’s transparently a plea by institutions in poor provinces to get funded in the same way as some of their peers in wealthier provinces.

One way that governments can avoid this kind of argument is to institute funding formulas (indeed, in many cases, this is precisely the reason they were introduced).  Once a funding formula is created, and institutions are paid according to some kind of algorithm, it becomes tough to argue relative underfunding (that is, unless the formula is specifically re-jigged in such a way as to screw over one particular partner – as Quebec did with its famous “ajustement McGill”).  You can argue that the funding doesn’t weight activities the right way – small institutions tend to argue that fixed costs aren’t properly accounted for, large ones that research activities are never compensated adequately – but you can’t argue being underfunded because the criteria by which money is being distributed are objective.

In Canada, it’s really only Quebec and Ontario that have anything close to pure formula funding, based on input indicators.  Nova Scotia does have a formula, but weirdly only takes a reading of the indicators every decade or so; Saskatchewan has some weird block grant/formula hybrid, which is ludicrously complex for a province with only two institutions.  PEI and Newfoundland don’t really need formulae given that they are single-institution provinces.

That leaves Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, and New Brunswick.  In these provinces, money is delivered by block grant rather than on the basis of an algorithm, so there is plenty of scope for institutions to claim being “underfunded” relative to others in their province.   This means that institutions have a perennial rhetorical stick with which to beat government.

Or do they?  In fact, there is a way to check claims of relative underfunding, even in block grant provinces.  All one needs to do is to simply look at the distribution of money across an institution and see if it matches up with the distribution of funds one would see in a province that does have a funding formula (i.e. Quebec and/or Ontario).  If they don’t match, there’s probably a case for underfunding; if they do, there probably isn’t.

Tomorrow, we’ll try this out on Manitoba and New Brunswick.