Last week, the Government of British Columbia announced it was going to hold a post-secondary review.
Here’s the announcement. And here’s the terms of reference (ToR) for the review, possibly the longest ToR in Canadian history, including – get this – a bunch of blacked-out text indicating censoring, which was made even more hilarious because the censored bits quite clearly don’t say anything incriminating.
Figure 1: The Hilarious Bits of the BC ToR
The basics of the announcement are that the Government of British Columbia believes the following:
- That post-secondary education is important, and the feds cutting off the international student money train is very sad because the province certainly has no intention of funding the system properly itself, and:
- It’s dangerous to have an underfunded system, so BC universities and colleges need to be resilient, etc., and therefore a review needs to be conducted to find ways to make institutions more collectively efficient.
And so, the review – to be conducted by a capable former Deputy Minister, Don Avison – is charged with:
- Making recommendations on the governance and operational structure of the public post-secondary education system in British Columbia going forward:
- Recommending program delivery improvements within the context of the proposed governance and operational structure identified in #1 above.
- (Identifying) opportunities to adjust and/or improve revenues in order to move towards financial sustainability and address both short- and long-term financial challenges while assisting the sector in implementing changes identified in #1 and #2 above
With the final report to be submitted by March 15th.
Now, a lot people including me went pretty bug-eyed at this, for a number of reasons. First, because 3.5 months is not a lot of time to produce a comprehensive report (which might suggests that some conclusions have already been reached). Second, because institutions are already making lots of cuts and efficiencies in order to keep themselves afloat and why on earth would to government want to take on the task (and thus the blame) of trying to manage this on institutions’ behalf? And third, an “efficiencies” agenda in British Columbia is deeply fraught because outside the lower mainland the effective distance between institutions is so large that reducing program duplication is essentially impossible. If you cut a program at Selkirk College, there’s no other college that can step in and offer it more efficiently for the west Kootenays because you’re four hours in any direction from the next nearest institution. It’s not clear how you drive significant savings in colleges serving remote areas (of which there are a heck of a lot in BC) without closing campuses, which is presumably the one thing the government does not want to do.
(Although, that said, the campus closure thing certainly might be rearing its head on the Island, where the government simply does not know what to do about Vancouver Island University and its serious financial condition. I think the government’s preference would probably be to close half of it and hand the other half over to UVic to run, while UVic’s preference would be to run screaming from the entire mess. In theory, this Review process might give the government cover to do what it wants on the VIU front. We’ll see.)
I calmed down a bit later because as a colleague pointed out, it only looks weird if you assume the government wants a report that is actually comprehensive; that is, one that outlines which specific programs need to be eliminated, or what specific kinds of common back-office or technology solutions need to be adopted. If you relax that assumption, and instead think of the final report as outlining the principles that institutions (or government as the case may be) need to adopt when making decisions, then the timeline and the process look more reasonable.
The thing that still worries me a bit, though, is the ToR’s reference to governance. I suspect there are at least some in the government who believe that the college system’s complexity can be solved by greater central governance (recall that the UCP in Alberta had a similar inkling at the outset of its mandate). “The BC Community College” has a certain ring to it, and in theory you can save all sorts of money (fewer execs, single payroll and IT Systems, etc). I think the recent disastrous experience of New Zealand in trying to eliminate individual colleges and replace them with one big national polytechnic (Te Pūkenga) should be a big flashing warning light on that one. If little New Zealand is too geographically and economically complex for One Big College to work, the hopes of making it happen in BC are basically zilch.
We’ll see how this all works out soon enough, I guess. I have a feeling it’s going to be both more interesting and more contentious than your average review.
4 Responses
Here’s my great idea re the BC funding formula review (which therefore will not come to pass): What about a California system– one for universities, one for colleges. I have no idea whether it would work, but it’s at least newish thinking?
As someone teaching at a rural college, I know many don’t share my optimism about this review, and I completely understand why. The risk of job loss is real, and it is sad and frightening for people who care deeply about their institutions. But for the sake of rural students, communities, and long-term sustainability, we do need an honest look at structural duplication.
Rural colleges have already absorbed their efficiencies. We’ve seen reduced faculty, suspended programs, lost advising capacity, closed campuses, and frontline roles left unfilled. We are now at the point where further institution-by-institution cuts are harming access and undermining the communities we serve.
That’s why governance matters, not to build a Te Pūkenga-style super-polytechnic (New Zealand already showed how risky that model is), but because many rural institutions may simply be over-structured relative to their actual student scale. Selkirk, COTR, North Island, Coast Mountain, Northern Lights, and CNC each serve 3,000–10,000 learners, yet all maintain their own President, multiple VPs, Deans, and full corporate service teams. Conservatively, the executive footprint across these institutions is ~$15M annually, before benefits and other overhead.
Merging some of these smaller institutions, while preserving their identities, campuses, and local leadership, could generate meaningful savings without compromising access. One option worth exploring is four regionally-governed colleges outside the Lower Mainland, similar in scale to Okanagan College’s existing model:
• Island College (Camosun + NIC) — ~22,000 students
• Okanagan College — ~19,700 students
• Interior/Kootenay College (Selkirk + COTR) — ~18,000 students
• Northern College (CNC + Coast Mountain + Northern Lights) — ~14,500 students
These are student volumes Okanagan already manages successfully with one leadership spine. Yet today, those regions collectively maintain eight Presidents and ~20 VPs. Even just moving to four Presidents and ~12 VPs could conservatively free up $2.5–$3M annually, and that’s only Presidents and VPs, before any Dean/Director or systems consolidation.
I don’t know what this review will recommend, and this is only one possible approach. But I am hopeful this is not about closing colleges or eliminating programs. I hope it is about reducing structural duplication that does not teach students, does not support classrooms, and does not build the future workforce.
It’s not risk-free, and it won’t fix every issue (and yes, transitions are painful) but if the province is serious about long-term resilience instead of short-term austerity, governance reform may be the only remaining efficiency lever that doesn’t further harm rural access to education. As a faculty member, I’ve often worried about the future of post-secondary in my community but with this review, for the first time in years, I have hope that learners and communities won’t continue to be the ones paying the price.
I’m doing some research for my Masters in Education and I’m looking at it from more of a policy/ risk analysis lens, and this is very interesting to read. In AB, they were going to overturn the governance systems of the post-secs. Had it not been for the pandemic, the government was going to make two or three “super boards” and have all post-sec fall under those bodies. It sounded like it would make sense for efficiency’s sake but in reality what it was going to do was void every employment contract between the boards and the unions/ associations in the province, forcing each faculty association and staff union to renegotiate their contacts, and, I’d guess, forcing all of the groups to align financially under some strict funding categories. Profs at UofA might not be as well paid given this scheme or those who are at say MacEwan and are “professors” but aren’t actually partaking in any kind of graduate training (because Grant Mac and Mount Royal don’t have grad programs) might be redlined. Or the positions might be renamed given this overall structure. It would take a few years for all of the associations to dissolve and re-assert their contract, and by then it might be too late to regain what was lost.
At any rate, do I think BC could or would do this? No. Do I think a lot of provinces might bend toward this model to save some money and relieve themselves of the Board oversight and process for each institution? Possibly. But to echo the other commentor above, the report noted above – my guess – is just being authored to confirm an outcome that the govt already has. My guess it is to address the funding gap from International students and to allow for more increases to tuition funding and give institutions more flexibility when it comes to balancing their books. But I’m curious to dig deeper into this – thank you for the article.
Based on prior examples, amalgamation is more likely to lead to both increased administration costs (all the existing college managers – under new job titles, of course – plus the brand new executives of the new larger colleges) and a lot of disruption. Each PSI has its own labour relations climate and issues, its own institutional culture. Merging PSI’s together from the top down might work, but it is not going to happen overnight, and is likely to have effects on program delivery for a few years. I would add that the major cost savings of amalgamation would not come from eliminating some executives, but from closing or shrinking smaller campuses – and the definition of small changes quite a bit when institutions scale up. Terrace, Fort St. John, Castlegar and Courtenay all look a lot smaller and a lot more remote when viewed from Prince George, Cranbrook and Victoria, respectively.
This doesn’t mean there aren’t cost savings lurking about. Some problems might be solved by elimination of duplication of services within geographic areas (do CNC and UNBC really need to offer overlapping programs?) Others might be addressed by increasing the scope and footprint of existing shared services, such as BCNET, BCCAT and BCCampus to achieve economies of scale. However, I doubt there are any perfect or quick solutions.
On the other hard, if the government decides to make sweeping changes and disrupts post secondary for a few years, the population could become engaged with post-secondary education for the first time in decades. It might not be the sort of engagement that governments tend to welcome, though.