In the final scenes of the 1991 movie The Russia House, as Sean Connery is about to give “the shopping list” – a comprehensive list of questions about Soviet rocket technology – to what MI6 and the CIA believe is a potential Russian defector, there’s a conversation between a young agent and Edward Fox, who plays Sean Connery’s handler.

“Sir, the shopping list.  It’s only questions isn’t it?  It wouldn’t tell anyone anything?”

“Everything.  It would tell what we know by telling what we don’t know.  And it would tell them what we would most like to know.”

This has been rattling around in my mind since HESA was asked to make a submission to the Ontario Blue-Ribbon Panel on Post-Secondary Education Financing.  We were given a list of six questions – pointedly, they came from the Ministry of Colleges and Universities and not the Panel (the politics behind that must be pretty interesting).  HESA’s response, for those interested, is here.   But what I want to speak to are the questions themselves: what they tell us about what the Government of Ontario knows, doesn’t know and would like to know.  You can see the full list here but I will try to summarize.

Two of the questions are directly related to the very short-term issues the government needs to deal with.  They want opinions about French language higher-education for the quite obvious reason that the province is now funding two French-language institutions, whose combined domestic enrolment consists of exactly 66 students (as of the 2021-22 data released recently by the province) and it would prefer not to have to do something so ludicrously cost-ineffective.  The question about how to improve student assistance isn’t much of a mystery, either: the government knows it needs to allow domestic tuition to rise, and it figures it can’t do it without bumping up student assistance.  No surprise on either count.

The question about Northern education is interesting.  It implies that the province understands that there is a problem with funding education in the North, but does not suggest that it understands why education in the North is fundamentally fragile.  It asks about the possibility of “new delivery mechanisms” to make education more sustainable – this is presumably a reference to a greater use of distance education.  But this question does not really get to grips with the fact that the underlying cost driver of all forms of education, presential or distance, is class size.  One possible interpretation of this is that the province sees “new delivery mechanisms” as tools for increasing class sizes, by aggregating learners across the North into a smaller number of classes. A less charitable alternative is that the province does not understand (or is not willing to face the implications of) the key cost drivers in higher education.

The question about international students is very intriguing.  It does not ask “how many international students is too many?” (which, let’s face it, is the question everyone else is asking).  Rather, it asks ‘what is the role of international students within a sustainable and thriving PSE system?’.  That’s an acknowledgement that internationalization is about more than money, but also that money is a key, unignorable ingredient.  My worry here is the part of the question that concerns housing: the housing problem is portrayed as a (potentially negative) “student experience”: what is missed entirely is the way that increasing international student numbers are driving up housing prices not just for students but for all renters near post-secondary education.  The way the question is phrased suggests that the Government of Ontario is still having difficulty understanding/admitting the true magnitude of the problems it has helped unleash on Ontario communities by starving institutions of domestic funding and allowing colleges to go hog wild with Private-Public Partnerships.

I’ve left the two most important questions for last.  One relates to the sustainability of institutional finances.  Specifically: 

How do we ensure sustainability through sound institutional financial health practices, continuous improvement and healthy competition in the postsecondary education sector? Consideration could be given to, among others, i) measures that generate revenue, ii) measures that reduce costs, iii) governance and accountability framework of institutions to ensure ongoing financial viability iv) compensation, talent attraction and incentivizing productivity gains and v) Credential qualification structures and program architectures

This question is both rambling and wild.  It’s basically asking “why can’t those institutions do more stuff that takes the pressure off the provincial government”, when in fact Ontario institutions are Canadian champions at doing without provincial government funding.  Public funding of Ontario post-secondary education, whether you measure it in per-capita terms, per-student terms, or as a % of GDP, are about 40% lower than the average in the other nine provinces.  These questions are, quite simply, based on a false premise.  That the Government believes it to nevertheless be true is perhaps not surprising but is nevertheless deeply concerning.

(The sub-question about credential qualification structures is the only interesting bit here, as it seems to be opening up a question, buried for a decade or so now, of whether we need four-year degree structures anymore.  This is an interesting question: with lower unemployment rates and higher incomes for low-skilled workers, the opportunity cost of education is rising, and the attractiveness of shorter degrees might be rising as well.  Last time out, the discussion was unfortunately led by then-Minister Glen Murray who had all the effectiveness of a screen door on a submarine, politically speaking.  But that’s worthy of a full-on set of consultations on its own, not as a throw-away sub-question on a laundry list of a limited-distribution consultation questionnaire)

And finally, there is the question about better outcomes.  Again, let me give that to you in full:

How could the Ministry of Colleges and Universities’ (“the ministry’s”) funding approach and associated levers (including operating and special purpose grants, student financial assistance, performance-based funding and Strategic Mandate Agreements) best drive institutional excellence?  Consideration should be given to i) Increasing program offerings that are labour market relevant and align with employer and local community needs, ii) providing sufficient labour market information to help students make informed choices and transition into the labour market and iii) responding to students needs/choice and demonstrating value for money.

There are a lot of things we learn from this question, but let me focus specifically on two of them.

First, I get that these questions are related to a consultation on funding, but the lack of any consideration that issues like quality, choice, etc. might better be tackled through non-financial instruments – quality assurance and regulation, for instance – seems pretty striking.  It really does seem as though the government thinks that the hammer of institutional funding is the only tool it has and therefore every policy problem is a nail.  Which suggests more than anything else a weak grasp of policy tools. 

Second is the idea that institutions currently aren’t labour market relevant and aligning with employer and local community needs.  This can’t actually be sustained by any quantitative data.  University and college graduate employment rates are higher than they have been since the financial crisis, and salaries are gradually rising too.  So what does the question actually imply? 

Here’s my guess, based not so much on what I’ve seen across Ontario as what I have seen across the country over the past couple of years.  What is spooking governments these days are not graduate unemployment rates but bottlenecks in the economy being caused by so-called “skills shortages” – that is, shortages of people with experience in specific sectors which either cause cascading problems through the rest of the economy (for instance in construction) or which are throttling expansion of companies in “hot” sectors (e.g. IT).

Let’s leave aside the difficulties involved in institutions’ actually achieving very much on this front.  What is fascinating to me at least is that governments – I will use plural here because I hardly think Ontario is alone in thinking this way – don’t seem to have a vocabulary that allows them to state this case directly.  And so the way it is expressed is not “how can everyone work together to ensure better labour-market foresight/reduce skills bottlenecks”?  It’s “why aren’t institutions doing a better job at giving some anthropomorphized version of the Labour Market what “it” needs”?  That’s not just an unfortunate and not-particularly-helpful framing: it’s also one that is more grounded in “gut feelings” and listening to the squeakiest wheel than it is on hard data.  Which is a shame, because hard data in this area would be useful.

Anyways: I’m no Tom Stoppard (who wrote the Russia House script) let alone a John LeCarré (who, I recently learned, was at the outset of his literary career strenuously urged to pick a more American-friendly nom de plume: specifically “Chunk Smith”).  But I can read and interpret a set of questions.  And these ones suggest that there is a lot of room for improvement in the state of the Higher Education policy discourse in Ontario. 

Please be advised that the regular Thursday podcast/blog will this week appear on Friday.  Apologies for the delay.