I spent a wonderful couple of days in London last week at the Festival of Higher Education, put on by the excellent folks at WonkHE (go sign up for all their stuff right now, because they are great). It was a wonderful convening of a type that simply doesn’t happen in Canada: 600 university folks in one spot, just nerding out on a whole bunch of issues bedeviling the sector. And not just the usual suspects at the top of institutional pyramids, either—a very interesting selection of people from all parts of the enterprises(s), and a nice showing of students, too. All of it held in the University of London’s iconic main building, the Senate House, which I learned via my friend Johnny Rich was actually the inspiration for George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth (it had been the home of the Information Ministry during WWII). To my regret, I did not have the time or courage to find Room 101.

Anyways, part of the reason for my trip was just to soak it all in and see how us simple denizens of HESA Towers might be able to bring some of this magic to Canada (WonkHE’s business model and that of its conferences is a lot easier in UK than it is in Canada, for reasons of both geography and federalism). But also, I was on the agenda, in a fun lightly structured bull session moderated by WonkHE’s excellent Jim Dickinson on what the UK can learn from Canada. And, dear reader, do you know what fascinated the living daylights out of this crowd? Laurentian.

You see, UK universities are about 8-12 months ahead of Canadian ones in terms of being in a financial emergency brought on by the lack of international students (the reasons for their drought are different from ours). They are deeply worried that one or more universities are headed for insolvency in the coming months, and they have absolutely no idea what that might look like because that has never happened before. So, yeah, they are pretty interested in Laurentian (n.b. I am writing a piece on this for the Higher Education Policy Institute to explain Laurentian to a UK audience—look for it, probably early in the new year), particularly as a failure of governance.

But I also had a chance to talk about England’s higher education system, courtesy of a question from an ex-pat Canadian in the audience who wanted me to comment. “What,” she asked me “would you say are the main differences between English and Canadian higher education? How do they focus differently?” Such a good question. Very roughly, this is how I responded:

At some point in the postwar period—my grasp on UK HE history is too shaky to give you an exact date—Oxford and Cambridge got put on the public dime. In the short term, this was probably a good deal, but in the long term it had the unfortunate (from the Oxbridge perspective) of treating these two universities just like everybody else. This, in the eyes of folks in Whitehall (a significant proportion of whom, let’s be honest, are themselves graduates of Oxford and Cambridge) was a mistake, but not one which is easy to undo. And so for at least three decades now, the main aim of UK Higher Education policy has been to find off-budget ways of funneling money to these two institutions. And by off-budget, I mean market-based mechanisms. Mainly, fees.

So the whole idea behind the fee rises of both 2006 and 2012 were that as caps on fees were removed, a market would emerge wherein some institutions would be able to charge the maximum and some would not. Basically, prestigious universities would monetize their prestige and hence pull away from the newer universities. But because the government was offering loans to all students, the market showed no price sensitivity whatsoever—all institutions charged the maximum precisely because to charge lower fees was to admit lesser prestige.

But in the meantime, the government decided that since it had shifted student financing to the “customer” (i.e. students) that higher education was a proper market in need of regulation like any other (allowing new private entities to offer degrees also had an effect on system regulation). The system already had a Quality Assurance Agency which did the kind of things QAAs do in most of the world, only possibly a bit more bossily. It already had a quinquennial Research Excellence Framework (REF) which determined the allocation of basic research funds (unlike North America where base funding covers both research and teaching, in England as in most of Europe, government funds to support faculty salaries and basic activities in teaching and research are split and distributed on different bases), which was quite complicated and involved an awful lot of work at the institutional level. To these it now added a new regulator, the “Office for Students” (actually a merger of a couple of earlier, smaller regulators), a “Knowledge Exchange Framework” (KEF) to evaluate universities on how they were transmitting knowledge into their communities and a “Teaching Evaluation Framework” which was meant to measure the quality of teaching and at one point was even mooted as a way to allow the “best” institutions to charge higher fees, until it turned out that the wrong (i.e. younger, lower-prestige) universities kept showing up at the top of the list.

And NONE of it is light-touch. Brits—academic Brits, anyway—are incredibly good at problematizing everything in higher education and so their regulatory systems are designed to be resilient even in the face of some exceedingly picayune critiques. Thoroughness like this is not a bad instinct, necessarily, but when there are so exhaustingly many different types of external regulation or monitoring or evaluation, this thoroughness becomes exhausting. Institutions effectively stumble from one external evaluation to the next. And what’s really wild is the widespread acceptance in the UK that all of this is desirable, that without it, public trust in institutions would dissipate and foreign students would shun them.

So, the advice I gave them, from a Canadian perspective, was basically (not quite verbatim) “Stop. Calm the F— Down. Most of this is unnecessary”

“Canada has no REF, no TEF, no KEF. We have nothing resembling the Office for Students. External quality assurance, where it exists, is so light touch as to be basically invisible. This does not stop us from having four or five universities in the Global top 100, eight in the top 200, and twenty or so in the top 500. We may not punch much above our weight, but we at least punch at it. And with a minimum of fuss and nonsense.”

“We don’t get everything right—Laurentian is proof of that—but on the whole we’ve got a pretty good system both in terms of research intensity and social inclusion. The latter is down in great measure to the fact that we might have the world’s best system of non-university tertiary education (that is, our community colleges). Diversity in institutional missions matters.”

“I am pretty sure Canada probably leans a little too far the other way on regulation, and we should learn a bit from the UK, particularly on external quality assurance. But what the UK can and should learn from Canada is that it is possible to put together a world-class higher education system based not on external regulation but rather on the intrinsic motivation of professional pride and hard work of the academic and non-academic staff who work there.”

Despite everything, we’ve got a reasonably good system in Canada. And if we can make it work with slightly less money, we’ll still be ok five years from now, too. There aren’t a whole lot of systems I’d trade places with. And a lot of that is down to the fact that we aren’t overburdened with regulation. Let’s hope we can keep it that way.