There was a great story by the Globe’s James Bradshaw in July on the fate of the $17.5 Million of SSHRC’s budget that was set aside by the Government of Canada for “business-related degrees” in the 2009 federal budget that didn’t get the attention it deserved on account of coming out too close to the Canada Day weekend. Basically, it revolved around Rotman’s Roger Martin’s assertion that the program was an “abject failure” because it went to almost everyone except MBA students.
What’s most interesting to me about Bradshaw’s story – apart from the obvious stuff about how the same community that whined about the PMO “directing” SSHRC to put aside a new pot of money for (horrors) business had no qualms at all about accepting PMO-directed money when it came under the label of the “digital economy” – is how the scheme’s authors (including Martin) came to think their original plan was a good idea.
Martin, apparently, was under the impression that SSHRC operates as a giant slush fund for grad students, and the story implies that what Martin thought he was getting with the 2009 budget was a pot of money that MBA students could use to offset their ever-heftier tuition fees. It’s easy to scoff at the naivete of this view, but it’s easy enough to see where he might have got this impression; directly or indirectly, something like two-thirds of SSHRC’s budget ends up with graduate students.
It makes you wonder: is SSHRC’s primary purpose to relieve institutions of the burden of funding all those social science graduate students? If institutions had to fund their own graduate students, would we have anything like as many graduates students in the arts as we do? Have we implicitly federalized the Social Sciences and Humanities, and if so, what should the implications of this be?
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SSHRC’s purpose is of course to fund research, the “R” that you mention, but part of that mandate is surely to help train the next generation of researchers by supporting what amount to “apprenticeships” under the direction of established researchers. I could not have gone on to doctortal studies without a SSHRC fellowship.
And if you think the federal government is funding a large portion of the social science and humanities graduate students, you might want to check the figures for the number of science and engineering students funded indirectly by NSERC and CIHR.
I wasn’t thinking so much about numbers of students supported – more about proportion of total dollars spent. I don’t know of any statistics, but it’s my strong suspicion that institutions pay a much larger portion of the bill for graduate students in non-SSHRC disciplines. And I think as a result they pay more attention to students in those disciplines…they have more “skin in the game”, so to speak.