So, everyone seems to be getting very upset about the Government of Alberta having cut budgets by 7%. Of course, cuts are always very painful, but I think it’s worth stopping to consider the government’s perspective on this issue, which I think boils down to this specific graph:
Figure 1: Provincial Government Expenditures per FTE Student, Selected Provinces
(Since I know some of you will ask: Data is StatsCan, drawn from the 2012-13 CAUT Almanac: Provincial expenditures are from 2008-09, Table 1.3; Student numbers are from 2009-10, Table 3.2. Yes, the numbers are a bit old – we can only do so much with StatsCan in its given state – and slightly more up-to-date numbers would change specific figures in each province. But they wouldn’t change the basic picture, which is that government $/student in Alberta is about 40% higher than in Quebec, 50% higher than in BC, and close to double what it is in Ontario).
So, if I’m the Government of Alberta, and looking at the fact that the Americans have worked out this shale gas thing, and the main prop of the provincial budget has gone all pear-shaped, and I’m contemplating the question, “where can I save some money”, you’d have to conclude that, in fact, universities – indeed, PSE generally – are one heck of a tempting target, no?
I mean, what’s Alberta buying for that extra money, exactly? Slightly better-paid profs, which allow them to recruit better staff. Somewhat lower teacher-student ratios, which is also good. Lower tuition fees, for sure. But they could probably do all that almost as well with $1300 or $1400 less, per student – especially true since per student funding would have to drop by about 35% before Alberta would find itself anywhere near the national average.
So are Albertans just whiners? Well, no. See, the thing about university finances is that they’re supremely inflexible. Salaries and benefits make-up about 50% of all spending, and dumping salary quickly is damn near impossible; it’s even harder if you’ve just negotiated a contract with staff, guaranteeing raises of 2-3% over the next four years. If you can’t touch that, then a 7% cut quickly becomes a 14% cut in non-salary areas. That’s pretty brutal, even if you are starting from a very high base. And in Ontario, at least institutions can partly offset cuts through tuition – something Alberta institutions were forbidden to do.
There’s no question the Alberta universities are undergoing a wrenching change – the biggest, in fact, since the Bouchard government dropped the boom on Quebec universities in 1997. But at the same time, let’s keep in mind how lucky Alberta universities are to begin with. There isn’t a single Ontario university that wouldn’t beg to switch places with them.
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Focusing on being upset about the budget cuts simplifies the issues a little too much. Working at one of these Alberta institutions, I think what concerns us even more is the fact that post-secondary institutions were given the mandate letter from the government telling us how we all should become one contiguous unit so that students could seamlessly move from a community college to a university to a polytechnic. We already have a well-formulated transfer guide that’s publicly available so students know which classes to take that they can get full credit for. No one is happy about the mandate. In addition, it wasn’t so much that the budget was cut; it was that the government had promised an increase in funding, so people made their operating budgets for that year based on the increase, and then we were told it was going to actually be cut instead. So people are feeling that they can’t trust the government and also that this same deceptive government is now telling us what the function of all post-secondary education should be: as training facilities so people can get jobs, a heavily debatable notion. If we had simply been told that we were going see cuts right from the start and no mandate letter was given, I’m quite sure that news would have gone over much better. With just budget cuts alone, we’ve survived them before and would have done so again.
Hi there. Thanks for reading.
Re: mandate letters: the government has withdrawn the letters and accepted the institutions’ position that everyone should take a 6 month breather and come back at these in the fall, no? My impression is that this doesn’t seem to have quietened the protest. I’d agree with your assessment that the trust issue is a big one – thought it’s not a point I see being made overtly in public (which may not mean much given my distance from events).
Alex, this is another interesting post.
The government in Alberta has continued to make statements that echo the mandate letters — promising to directly interfere in collective bargaining at universities, for example. It is this attitude (“You guys are broken and we, the government, are going to tell you how to fix things”) that fuels much of the reaction here.
This reaction is also now being driven by the cuts becoming real as several institutions lay off employees and programs are curtailed or closed altogether.
In the context of a disorderly loss of funding accompanied by non-consultative change (rather than being asked to be partners in solving the underlying problems), it is not surprising that the discontent continues to rise.
As I said in response to another post, the messages I’m seeing in media (social or otherwise) have for the last couple of weeks been very $ focussed, not nonconsultative change-focussed. I may just be missing the nuance.
It seems striking to me, anyway, that the government’s acceptance of a 6-month break in the mandate discussion doesn’t seem to have mollified anyone.
Can you clarify what parts of the Alberta post-secondary sector are captured in the per-cap spending amount given here, Alex? One of the sources of confusion and concern in the province is that the minister and premier keep lumping together what have hitherto been seen (including in the legislation) as 26 different institutions in six different sectors, with different niches in the total system. They have made claims about provincial funding relative to other provinces, but always with reference to the whole post-secondary system, not just the universities, and they have not publicized the data on which those claims are based, so it is very hard to parse out the claims. Reading your post, well, it is unfortunate if 08-09 numbers are the best we can do: that was the last of 4 or 5 years of annual 6% increases in the AB per capita grant, and we have seen consistent retrenchment in real $ terms since then.
Second question: how do Canadian funding levels per student stack up internationally? The U of A president has claimed that, even after years of budget pressure in California, UC Berkeley spends far more per student than we do (see http://www.ualbertablog.ca/2013/04/myth-busting.html). Is that true? Is it relevant?
Hi Ryan.
It’s universities only. UC, UA, ULeth, Athabasca, MtR, Macewan.
When someone says Berekeley “recieves” $9000 more, my guess is that that’s from all sources, not just the state of California. If I;m not mistaken, state appropriations at Berekeley are about $300 M/year. Tuition is around 12K for California students – for out-of-staters (incl. international), who make up a very large portion of the population, the fee is in the 30K+ range, I believe. You have to remember that state funding at big flagship research institutions (UWash, UMich, Berkeley and UCLA) is only about 15-20% of their their total income. Now, a lot of that is research and hence “non-opreating”. I don’t pay enough attention to UC finances to give you a breakdown, but I would still think that operating is a heck of a lot bigger than U of A, in perstudent terms.
Hi Alex,
So your numbers include grants for capital spending, correct?
Probably. Would need to look up definition in CAUBO docs.
“I mean, what’s Alberta buying for that extra money, exactly?”
The simple answer is prosperity through education, which leads to increased opportunities, wages, and quality of life. To argue differently is to ignore nearly every study on the value of post-secondary education, including the recent household survey, and Alberta’s leading statistics in wealth creation, GDP per capita and quality of life indexes.
But the graph is also misinterpreted. It does not show that Alberta is overspending on education (i.e. profs are too highly paid), it just shows a higher government share because tuition has been kept low. Tuition in Alberta is very low (29.2% of operating revenue) compared to ontario (45.9% of operating revenue, Figure 1.6 in the 2013/14 CAUT).
By freezing tuition and cutting provincial funding, as suddenly and severely as it has – the government is shrinking the whole pie and uniquely attacking higher ed in Alberta.