This is the title of a recent-ish book (subtitle: a comparison between British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec, 1980-2010) edited, and largely written by Don Fisher and Kjell Rubenson of UBC, Teresa Shanahan of York U, and Claude Trottier of Université Laval.  Despite a couple of significant faults, it’s well worth a read.

The book’s main strengths are the three chapters that act as histories of each of the titular provinces.  We haven’t had a really decent history of Canadian higher education since Donald Cameron’s More Than an Academic Question, which came out almost 25 years ago now, and so this is a welcome addition.  (OK, it’s missing the other seven provinces, but these three provinces are 80% of the system, so that’s not too shabby.)  These chapters are thorough, detailed, and do a reasonably good job of mixing narrative storytelling with data analysis.  That’s no mean feat.

Where the book falls down (to some extent, anyway) is on two points, in particular: the analysis of accessibility, and the analysis of what they call marketization and neoliberalism.

First, on accessibility.  It’s pretty clear from the text that accessibility is defined entirely in terms of tuition fees.  Their look at student aid is superficial.  In particular, the insistence on comparing Quebec’s efforts to other provinces without taking into account the Canada Student Loans Program indicates they don’t understand the system very well.  (There’s a similar problem on R&D and the role of granting councils – the absence of a section on federal policy occasionally makes it difficult to understand what actually happened.)

What the authors do instead, in contravention of nearly all the international literature, is make a distinction between accessibility (i.e., fees) and “participation” – which is what everyone else would call accessibility.  They proceed to do two things: first, they directly compare combined college/university participation rates across the three provinces without mentioning the fact that PSE in Quebec lasts five years, while in the other provinces it’s four years.  This makes Quebec look slightly better than the other provinces, which most analysts would say is not entirely warranted.  Second, they are then surprised (really?) that even with this juking of the stats, participation rates in QC are not higher then they “should” be, given the tuition differences.  This suggests a view of access/participation that is particularly one-dimensional, and not informed by much actual literature on the subject.

And yet the issue of fees is a central one in this book.  At least one of the book’s authors – my guess would be Fisher – is really desperate to make as much hay as possible out of “marketization” in higher education, and then use this as evidence of a “neoliberalism” in which “competition” and higher fees are believed to be a spur to quality.  And while there are definitely people out there who believe this trope, the evidence that anyone in either Ontario or BC ever believed it is pretty thin (in fact, both governments introduced new external monitoring bodies to oversee quality assurance).  Yes, the Harris Tories and Campbell Liberals both allowed tuition fees to rise (as did the the NDP and Liberals in Ontario, albeit at slower rates), but allowing tuition fees to rise and “marketization” (let alone “neoliberalism”) are not one and the same thing.

There are lots of goods for which government shares costs with individuals: public transit, for instance.  The province and city put in some dough, but individuals have to pay to use the service.  Over the past couple of decades, costs have risen.  In 2005, here in Toronto, I could get on the TTC for $2.50.  Now, it’s $3.25, a 30% increase in nominal terms.  Now, if I went around telling everyone we had a neoliberal transit system because of a change in costs – irrespective of how much each government puts into the service – people would think I was mental.  Yet that’s effectively what this book argues with respect to higher education, to its distinct discredit.

So, the history is good, but the analysis ranges from decent to terrible.  Still, I urge you to pick up this book if you’re a Canadian higher ed buff.  It’s worth it, flaws and all.