Among the many articles related to education which have appeared over the past few weeks are three which I think deserve highlighting:  Mike Moffat & John McNally’s very good Making a Green Recovery Inclusive for All Canadians, Irvin Studin’s unfathomably terrible Canada Needs a Temporary Minister of Education and the needs-some-work “Leveraging the value of Canadian universities is key to our economic rebuild” by John Stackhouse and Andrew Schrumm.

Let’s start with the Moffatt/McNally piece, which in truth is only tangentially related to post-secondary education. This is precisely why everyone should read it. As we head toward the next federal budget, which by all accounts will involve a rather stonking amount of new spending in the name of “recovery,” on top of the hundreds of billions already spent in the name of emergency stabilization, every lobbying outfit in town is going to be claiming that their issue is absolutely key to the recovery, really, cross our hearts and hope to die, the whole country will be imperilled if we don’t get this $X billion come budget time.  And there’s an extra urgency for this budget because this is starting to look like a one-time deal as far as expenditures go: we’ve got a long period of tight budgets ahead to pay for all of this, so it’s now or never.  So, either your cause finds a way into the “Green Recovery” agenda or you have a problem.

The Moffatt/McNally piece is good because it covers a lot of ground on the “green recovery” idea and raises two particular under-appreciated points.  First, that the jobs lost in the crisis are mostly those occupied by younger workers and by women – hence the appellation “she-cession” (thank economist Armine Yalnizyan for that good little neologism).  The second is that green economy jobs are not particularly inclusive because the workforce in this industry, as indeed in pretty much every scientific industry, skews older and male.  So the whole notion of a “Green Recovery” is actually fairly problematic, particularly if you equate this term with a lot of infrastructure spending (and what self-respecting university or college President does not have a whole bunch of plans for new LEED-compliant buildings or retrofits in their back pocket just waiting for a Knowledge Infrastructure Part III announcement?)

The point here is that if you really bother to think about it, higher education doesn’t have that much to do with a Green Recovery that centers the people who have been most hurt by the economic crisis to date, except in so far as there should be a push to fund grad students and maybe early career researchers in the sciences (a population younger and more female than the usual suspects in this game).  More generally, though, higher education does not look so good as an investment in inclusive recovery, and that should give everyone in the sector pause.

Over to Studin’s article about the pressing need for a temporary Federal Minister of Education, just to get us through the present crisis which, if anything, is an even sillier idea than setting up a permanent federal ministry.  The basic logic at work here is this:

1)      Education is a provincial responsibility

2)      But Man are provincial governments botching the re-opening of K-12 schools

3)      Look!  Other federations have Ministries of Education!

1 is true, obviously.  In fact, 1 is pretty much the entirety of the bargain that permitted Confederation to happen in the first place.  2 is true in most provinces.  Certainly it is true here in Ontario where the re-opening has been marked by a torrent of evasive lies about why they are not reducing class sizes plus utter buffoonery in the way they have handled unions, school boards, parents, etc.  It is, indeed, maybe the most shambolic thing the Ford government has done in its two-year history and that is saying something.  But what in the hell does 3 have to do with 1 and 2?

There are two ways to look at this.  The first is whether “having a ministry” means anything.  In many European countries it just means there is a central locus for policy on higher education, and in particular student aid and research.  Canada’s federal government takes on the same set of responsibilities, it just chooses to split their execution across several ministries (mainly: ESDC, ISED and Health).  And since literally no one has ever made a persuasive case concerning how either student aid or the granting councils would improve if we stuck them under the same ministry, really – who cares. 

(And also: WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH K-12?  Pretty much the only country where a national government has anything to do with K-12 is the United States. The creation of the Department of Education is a historical accident based partly on the Department of Agriculture no longer wanting to have to deal with administering school lunch programs and partly on the NEA wanting an easier target to lobby, and of course what they got instead was Betsy Devos – two cheers for the law of unintended consequences).

But the second is: what on earth good is a “temporary” federal minister going to do?  What authority could such a figure possibly possess?  What intellectual or policy resources could such a Minister bring, when Ottawa knows nothing (literally nothing) about K-12 education?  What value could such a ministry possibly add who would listen to it?  Yes, of course, Ottawa could write bigger cheques and shame the provinces into stronger action that way (a little late now, but whatever) – but that hardly requires a new ministry. 

Finally, there is the Stackhouse and Schrumm’s piece on online education.  The kernels of goodness here are 1) that having a good online education game might be beneficial for the country and for institutions in the sense that it will bring more students and hence more revenue and 2) by not playing the codswallop “oh we’re definitely going to in-person instruction” game that American and UK institutions have over the past few months, we’ve actually spent a lot of time, effort and money getting good at this over the last few months.  And maybe, just maybe, that’s something we could turn to collective advantage.

To this extent, Stackhouse and Schrumm are on to something.  But moving from that insight into an action agenda is far more complex than they seem to appreciate.  Their idea, basically, is that there could be some kind of “Canada U” – a joint enterprise of all institutions – which could be online and upon completion of 50 percent of a desired program, would entitle the foreign student to come straight to Canada and finish their degree here.

This misunderstands both the student incentives at play (why do this when they could just…you know…enroll at a Canadian institution for their entire program?), and the institutional ones.  It’s not simply that the chances of Canadian universities banding together to deliver a single online service are precisely zero because they all have their own business lines to protect.  It’s that this proposal assumes that “programs” and the courses that make them up are far more interchangeable than they actually are.  It assumes an internal credit transfer scheme that simply does not exist in most of Canada (and even where it does exist, it never ever ever involves complete acceptance by one institution of another’s credits).  There may well be ways to increase international enrolments via remote leaning, but this proposal isn’t it.

Tomorrow: the fabulous return of The State of Postsecondary Education in Canada.