If you’re in Ontario and are paying attention to the discussions around lobbying the provincial government for more money, you may have heard words to the effect of “we need to get rid of the corridor” or “we need to get rid of the cap.” This post is a small plea for everyone in Ontario to eliminate this phrase from their vocabularies immediately and start using more straightforward language instead.

Some background on how the way the enrolment-based portion of the Ontario funding formula (and indeed most places around the world) works is probably apropos here. The government creates a set of relations between the costs associated with different fields of study. To simplify radically, the government counts a student in a lecture base course as being worth X dollars, a student in a laboratory course as being worth 2x and a student in a clinical course being worth 5x. It then adds all those together to come up with a total number of weighted student units (WSU) for each institution. When it votes for a certain amount of funds for institutions (say, a billion dollars), it then divides this figure among the institutions according to their share of total WSUs. So, if your institution has 10% of all WSUs, then in this example, it would receive $100 million.

The incentive structure here should be plain. Every institution will think: “ah, I can get a bigger piece of the pie if I enroll more WSUs.” Which is only true if everyone else holds their enrolments constant. If instead all institutions increased their enrolment by, say, 5%, then all institutions would still have the same share of total WSUs and hence exactly the same financial allocation because the value of each WSU would fall. This begets an arms race, with everyone trying not only to increase their enrolment, but increase them faster than the system-wide average, for this is the only way that extra funds can be generated.

Such was the situation Ontario was in during the late 00s and early 10s. For the latter half of this period, the size of the youth population was decreasing, meaning that institutions were chasing more and more students among a smaller and smaller cohort, which created some worries about the quality of students entering universities (we don’t know that quality actually declined, because that would require data and if there is one thing Canadian governments and institutions agree on it is that data doesn’t matter and should on no account be collected, let alone published). As a result, the Ontario government adopted a policy called “corridor funding.”

What the province did was to cap every institution’s WSU figures at or near where they were in 2016; in effect freezing each institutions’ share of provincial funding. (it is called a corridor because there is a floor as well as a cap, but for the purpose of this discussion, it’s easier to think of it just as a cap). The government could have—but chose not to—directly impose what in other countries is sometimes known as “number controls.” Institutions remain completely at liberty to enroll as many students as they like they want. But they are capped on the number who “count” for funding purposes. 

This did not, in fact, deter institutions from recruiting students above the limit, for two reasons: one moral and one tactical. The moral one is simply that most institutions feel an obligation to keep their doors open to the public and dislike closing the doors to the public, particularly now that demographic trends have shifted and the number of students applying is increasing rather than decreasing. The tactical one is something institutions learned from the last time the provincial government tried this in the 90s and early 00s: basically, if you run up your numbers, eventually the government will cave and start counting them (this in fact roughly what happened the last time the government tried this in the 90s and early 00s). 

So, it is certainly true, as universities say, that many students are now “outside the cap” and technically not being funded by government. And so, a slogan of “get rid of the caps” sounds reasonable. Who wouldn’t want all their students to be funded? But here’s the thing: imagine the government got rid of the corridor. If that is the only thing they do, then we’re just back into the pre-2019 arms race status quo. Additional WSUs will be funded, but each additional WSU dilutes the value of the WSU, so while a couple of fast-growing institutions may benefit, the system as a whole is not better off.

If blowing up the corridor model doesn’t bring in additional aggregate funding, why are Ontario universities are so het up to blow up the corridors? The answer should be obvious: removal of the corridor is thought to be a means to an end: what they want is additional funding to be attached to extra students. Or, to simplify, when they say, “blow up the corridors,” what they mean is “pay us more money so we can educate more students.”

Isn’t that simpler and clearer? 

A recent Council of Ontario Universities (COU) media release tried to straddle this issue by asking for two things: i) better per-student funding, and ii) getting rid of the cap. But a moment’s thought shows how weird this is. The first ask, on its own, would provide more funding to institutions in the aggregate. The second ask, on its own, would not: it would only change the distribution of funding between institutions. So why even bother raising it? It would make sense if a student (or a weighted student unit) had a fixed value, but as we have seen, it does not; rather, the value of each unit declines as the number of units increases. 

It is a genuine mystery to me why Ontario universities have chosen to turn a relatively simple proposition (they are criminally underfunded and need more money to educate students the way we expect them to be educated) into a weird, technical conversation about funding model details, which is apparently so complicated that the institutions themselves don’t fully understand its implications. Why make your position moredifficult to explain, especially when it’s never been more vital that the public grasp their arguments?

Simplify, simplify.