Morning all.  Hope you had a good summer.  To welcome you back, let’s take a quick look at state of play in the sector as we start the academic year.

In Canadian PSE, I don’t think there’s a whole lot of doubt about where things are headed this year.  Post-Naylor, we’re going to be talking research, research, research.  If you doubt this, take a look at Universities Canada’s recent budget submission.   As always, there are three “asks”; for the first time I can remember all three asks are about research.  It’s clear that scientists – particularly those in health-related fields who have been jerked around the most in recent years – have been making their voices heard and that University Presidents at least are responding to that pressure by making this issue central to higher education lobbying for the next twelve months.

(I think this is poor form, actually.  Less than two years on from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and not an enormous amount of progress immediately evident, I’m not sure how appropriate it is to not have something on indigenous education this year.  But I’m not in charge.)

“Superclusters” will probably get a lot of mileage as they get announced in the run-up to the budget next winter.  Apparently the competition – which is supposed to have five winners – received 50 applications, each of which was supposed to have at least one post-secondary education partner.  However, we’ve also been told that only 20 PSE institutions’ names were attached to these proposals.  From this we can deduce that i) it’s likely that a handful of institutions’ – no prizes for guessing which ones – are on three or more proposals (rumour has it one is on no less than 18), and either ii) almost none of these proposals have more than one participating PSE institution or iii) there are a lot of the same institutions over and over again.  If it’s the latter then the program has basically abandoned the idea of clusters being geographic in nature and this program basically is back to Network Centre of Excellence but with some private enterprise attached.  Which defeats the purpose of this stuff, in my view.  No self-sustaining cluster gets by on research alone. It gets by more than anything on having lots of trained workers of various kinds.  And that means colleges and polytechnics *have* to be part of the mix.  If they’re not then this whole thing is a conceptual failure from the get-go.

(But hey, this is Ottawa.  No one’s ever going to measure the results.  And even if by some miracle the policy’s was found officially wanting, presumably they can always claim that it’s because they didn’t spend enough money.)

While much of the attention will be focussed on Ottawa, remember we live in a federal country.  For most institutions, the real game this year will be in provincial capitals.  2018 is going to see elections in Ontario (June) and Quebec (October).  Combined with a minority legislature in British Columbia, what we have is a situation where the country’s three largest provinces – all of whom have budgets which are more or less in balance – are going to be in spending mode for the next twelve months.  Not everyone is going to share in this bounty, of course. My guess would be that Manitoba, Newfoundland and Saskatchewan are going to see continued or intensified restraint and from what I hear Alberta is about to find out exactly how miserable a tuition freeze combined with zero funding growth can be.  But still, for the sector as a whole, what we have right now is possibly the best alignment of the constellations we’ve seen in about a decade.

Outside Canada, I think the big stories are going to be in Brazil, Russia, where the lingering effects of the commodity price collapse have left state budgets in very weak shape to fund higher education; in England the chaotic combination of Brexit and a historically incompetent/cowardly government will surely provide some entertainment, while in the US the twin topics of free speech on campus and the dismantling of many Obama-era improvements in student policy – particularly in the area of oversight of private colleges – will get top billing even if President Trump’s own ideas about student aid are surprisingly generous.

Here on this blog, I’m hoping to shift topic areas slightly this year.  Often last year I felt I wasn’t adding much to discussions beyond what I had already contributed in the previous five years, and I do worry sometimes about the blog feeling stale.  I hope this year to be able to focus a little bit more on areas I’ve dealt with less fulsomely in the past: particularly, colleges & polytechnics and on international PSE (the latter with a bit of a data focus).  Also, at some point this fall we will be moving to accept advertisements. We’ll see how all that goes.

And with that: have a good year, everyone.  Let’s get to work.