Morning all.  It’s summertime and it’s time to wrap things up.  Tomorrow, you will be getting our final podcast for the season – an interview with Yale Professor Zachary Bleemer on the upcoming US Supreme Course decision on university admissions (it’s a good one!).  But today is the last post of year 12 (time flies!) of the blog, and tradition demands I give a summing up and a look forward. 

The summing up is pretty simple.  When people look back on the 2022-23 academic year in Canada, people are going to remember two things.  First, that this was the year that Large Language Models showed up and forced academics and universities to start thinking about assessment in a really different way.  I am relatively sure this will in retrospect be a big deal, though 2020 was supposed to be a big deal in terms of re-thinking pedagogy, yet three years later, as far as the fundamentals of teaching go, it’s not clear whether we’ve moved all that far from 2019.  Old habits, etc.  We’ll see.

The bigger issue in Canada and especially Ontario is that the present financial model of higher education started showing significant strain.  When I started this blog 12 years ago, a couple of years after what I think we can now safely call “peak public higher education”, I was pretty sure we were entering an era where government tight-fistedness meant that institutions were going to have to become much more self-sufficient, market-smart, and margin-aware.  In the end, the first two came true but the third did not, because the miracle of ever-growing international student dollars saved institutions from having to make difficult choices.  Now, as negative externalities of that choice in the form of much higher rents and the escalating public disillusion with post-secondary institutions for imposing them become more and more evident, that particular form of salvation is no longer available.  And the consequences?  Well, they are increasingly showing up as budget shortfalls being dealt with via some form of budget squeeze, hiring freezes, and so on.

If something cannot go on forever, it doesn’t.  And this is the year that finally comes true.  So, the age of real change is about to start.

First, the way institutions ask the public for money is going to need to change.  This is especially true at the federal level, but it matters provincially too.  Universities spent the aughts making an economic case for higher education: money in = innovation out = prosperity for all!  Frankly, that hasn’t worked very well for the last decade or so and it’s time to acknowledge it.  Neither politicians nor the public at large is buying that story for the simple reason that it’s only about half true.  A successful renewed case for funding is not going to be built on the status quo.  It can only be by acknowledging that post-secondary institutions – universities in particular – are not quite delivering what the public feels it wants or needs, and that actual change needs to happen.  That means a lot more public engagement.  It means a lot more genuine reflection about program structure and offerings.

Within institutions, the end of the era of ever-increasing international student numbers is going to mean two things.  First, it is going to mean a lot more focus on price, for international students at least.  Maybe not so much in Ontario, where average international student fees are already over $40,000, but certainly in the rest of the country, where fees are typically about half that, the inability to increase numbers is going to put the focus on getting more net dollars for every student.

But second, and more importantly, it means that institutions, facing a scarcity of dollars, are going to need to be a lot more margin-aware in their activities.  This kind of talk irks a lot of folks – many assume that as soon as institutions start getting into such worldly matters such as budgets that we’re heading into the barbarism of academia being driven by “mere finances”.  But look, assuming everyone wants to get paid every two weeks, “mere finances” matter a lot.  And here I find myself in violent agreement with Bill Massy in his recent book Resource Management in Universities and Colleges: the only way to preserve the academic mission in hard times is by being rigorous about tracking resources and costs.  It’s not that every course or every program must make money – that’s silly, because financially-speaking the entire point of universities is to engage in cross-subsidization across disciplines.  But the corollary of cross-subsidization is that institutions must be explicit about what is being subsidized and why.  Will this mean a lot of hard choices?  Yes, of course.  But if academics aren’t a lot more explicit about what they wish to prioritize inside institutions, they are going to lose some things that really matter.  The days of “let’s keep everything” are over.  Typically, in these situations institutions go into survival mode, where everyone’s priority is about loss prevention.  But that’s exactly the wrong way to look at things.  The last thing institutions need right now is to work out “how to keep things the same with less”.  What we need now is transformative thinking: how to get better, and then let the available resources support that model as best we can.  

The hardest question in higher education leadership is this: how do you make a strong university or college, or more generally, how do you make a strong system stronger?  To my mind, it’s not primarily about incremental resources (not having to sweat the incremental helps, obviously, but it’s not the most important thing).  Rather, it’s about institutions – and by this, I mean everyone in institutions, not just management – having the will and the creativity to re-think existing models and create things anew.  For the next few years at least, adaptability will be at a premium.

Difficult?  Yes.  Exhilarating?  Also, yes. 

So, rest up this summer.  2023-24 is going to be a big year, I think: the stars are aligned for some genuinely new thinking and new approaches to higher education.  And at HESA Towers, we’re excited to pitch in where we can.

After tomorrow’s podcast, the blog will be back on Tuesday, September fifth.  See you then – and have a great break.