One of the most annoying things about Canadian governments’ relationship with universities is the fact that almost none of them have a consistent theory of universities. In other words, few governments—provincial, federal, or territorial—have actual understanding of what it is they are funding and why they are funding it.

Take, for instance, two of the more common criticisms governments make of universities:

1) “Universities should stop being copies of each other and start differentiating themselves and offering more niche courses”.

2) “Universities should make credits fully portable”.

Both of these are reasonable criticisms, but they are utterly incompatible with one another. If you want credits to be transferable, you need standardization. If you want differentiation, you can’t expect full transferability. It’s a trade-off: you simply can’t have both.

The argument that higher education should be more standardized is a pretty strong one. Why do we need to have institutions each creating their own “Accounting 100” classes? Why not adopt a common curriculum across the country for the 100-200 or so intro courses in the major disciplines to make transfering credit easier? Why increase the cost of education by multiplying curriculum design by 50 or 100 times?

Part of the answer here is that curriculum re-design at the course level can be quite infrequent and so it doesn’t really register as a cost per se (this is not universally true—some schools and some disciplines do re-design a lot more often than others—but, still, the way universities cost their activities typically does not separate out the curriculum design cost so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). But to the extent that costs are recognized, most institutions are happy to pay them because they think there is fundamentally some value in having faculty members think up unique ways to approach a subject.

Before we get too far into the discussion about how different institutions think of novel ways to approach a subject, I’ll note that I will be the first to say that there is a lot of nonsense in universities when it comes to the design of individual courses; most notably, that there seems to be a widespread view that classes belong not to the university but to individual professors. However, what is—or should be anyway—a source of fascination is the fact that institutions all seem to have different ways of stacking courses together into different academic programs. This exercise in program-building is the almost singular manifestation of some kind of genuine collective thought within an institution about what an education should actually look like. Surprisingly (or not), different groups of scholars come to genuinely different conclusions about what that education should look like. This happens not because of individual idiosyncrasies (though no doubt those play a role) but importantly because individual disciplines are not set in stone, which leaves room for genuine variations in the approaches that can be taken to get students to a point of mastering enough of a discipline to be considered “graduates”.

This whole exercise is not simply a question of the number of courses which go in different “buckets” of credits towards a degree: the choices of credits which are mandatory and which are not makes an enormous difference to the type of program an institution develops. The way in which certain classes are linked together in “streams” that allow specialization with a degree makes a big difference. And, of course, overall balance and orientation of courses (e.g., the balance of theory-oriented vs. practically-oriented offerings, the distribution of courses offered between sub-disciplines and methodological approaches) makes a difference. The latter is, to some degree, a reflection of personnel decisions and the sub-disciplinary backgrounds and traditions in which an institution’s staff were trained rather than an a completely disinterested decision, but still. What is produced as a result of this process is substantial array of choices that gives students a genuine set of options between approaches to a field.

Now some of this variety is wasted: no one bothers to look at outcomes of students taught in different programs to learn about outcomes. (And, to be honest, in the less practically-oriented programs some of the variation likely sails way over the heads of mere undergraduates—whether an Anthropology program is functionalist or neo-evolutionist is probably not a basis on which undergraduates choose a program.) Nevertheless, at this micro-level, institutions can and do present students with very different options for their education. If you’re a government that believes in choice, competition and those kinds of things: that’s a good thing, isn’t it?

In tomorrow’s blog I will have more on differences in program structures and approach, as well as an announcement about an interesting new initiative from us at HESA Towers. Stay tuned.