Last Thursday, the Government of Alberta finally released the long-awaited Alberta 2030: Building Skills for Jobs strategy, optimistically subtitled “a 10-year strategy for post-secondary education”.   So, after all the hullaballoo of the last year or so, what does it all mean for the province’s universities and colleges?

Let’s get the process stuff out of the way first.   The province did kind of publish some of the background research McKinsey did for $3.5M.  It’s incorporated in this 217-page power point (no, I am not kidding).  Conceivably, this is value for money: most probably would suggest it is not, since the actual recommendations, which I will get to in a moment, are not ground-breaking.  One colleague in Alberta suggested to me that the problem is really that the Alberta government is so inward-looking that they need to pay McKinsey $3.5 million just to get them thinking in terms that were largely accepted in Ontario ten years ago.  Harsh perhaps, but some days you have to wonder.

Anyways, if you just read the 32-page version I linked to up top, what you see is more or less what was leaked last November, which I reported on back here.  Despite the title, little of the report addresses skills per se – only one out of the six priorities concerns skills and mostly it’s about finding ways to get better employer feedback into institutions, expanding apprenticeships, and making work-integrated learning available to all (which you may remember as a carbon-copy of a Kathleen Wynne promise from the mid-10s).  There is also some stuff around innovation and commercialization that, at least in outline, are pretty much the same as any other jurisdiction in the world (more is good), though the details in the 217-page PowerPoint provide weirdly specific targets on licensing and patents which, if you ask me, are going to create all kinds of perverse incentives (amazingly, no one asked me).

But the interesting stuff is really in the two areas which were still unformed last fall.  The first had to do with tuition fees (McKinsey seemed to be proposing full de-regulation) and with governance (still flirting with multiple system-wide boards).  Back here, I suggested to the Minister that he allow significant tuition movement but pair that with equally significant increases in student aid, while on the latter he should announce the weakest possible system of “provincial advisory boards”, declare victory and go home.  In fact, the Minister did more or less this, but there are some significant caveats here, as becomes clear when you read the fine print in the 217-page PowerPoint.

The good news is on the governance side.  Not only has the government agreed to take at least some institutions – presumably the research universities – out of the government’s financial accounting (so-called “de-consolidation”) giving them the kind of financial autonomy and flexibility that Ontario institutions possess.  Not only has the government dropped most of the foolishness around system-wide governing boards in return for a couple of “system advisory councils” (a good thing).  But somehow, someone has got the government to agree to weaken the current system of governing board appointments, under which the Alberta government generally feels free to micromanage institutions to within an inch of their live. Instead, Alberta will move to a system where institutions get to nominate a majority of their board members.  This is truly excellent and will likely lead to better boards and better governance.  So much for the theory that what the government really wanted was a “Tory takeover” of higher education institutions.

The news is a little less good on the tuition side.  What the government seems to be contemplating is a general 7% increase in fees for each of the next three years, plus significant adjustments to professional tuition.  My back-of-the envelope calculations suggest that this will increase institutional revenues by $250 and $300 million after the three-year phase in.  The government makes a big deal that in response to this, it is going to double need-based aid.  But if you read the fine-print on pages 71-73 of the long document, what you find is that

•  The “doubling” might only be as high as 72% ($40 million).
• Though the big increase in tuition will happen over three years, the full phase-in for student aid will take eight years.
• The government is leaving open the possibility that 100% of the need-based aid will be paid for by diverting existing merit-based aid (which undoubtedly would be a step forward from an equity perspective but still suggests the government isn’t planning on adding a cent on student funding).

If they’d tripled the funding and phased it in over three years, that would have been closer to the mark, I think.  As it is, this just seems like the government is being parsimonious.

My overall impression is that the big picture directions are nothing special, mostly consisting of things that could be advocated in almost any Canadian jurisdiction.  The details might be a little less universally-applicable: some of the goals are weirdly specific and the sheer number of minutely-detailed timelines for something like 30-odd individual flagship projects is absurd, given that apparently they are all going to get done in the next 18 months (seriously, someone in the minister’s office needs to learn how to prioritize, because this to-do list is not happening).

Anyways, long story short: as a strategy, it’s a) not all that scary, b) not especially well-resourced, and c) absolutely never going to happen as envisaged unless someone starts extending timelines.  

A mixed bag, in other words.