Searching for a higher education strategy

By Andrew Potter - Thursday, April 21, 2011 at 3:24 PM - 10 Comments

Today, the good folks over at Higher Education Strategy Associates released their long-awaited analysis of the party platforms regarding post-secondary education. They were clearly rejigging parts of the analysis right up to the end – the document is larded with pictures of the party leaders taken from VintageVoter.ca.

The analysis looks at federal education policy proposals under main headings: Student Aid, Transfers to Provinces and Institutions, Research, and Apprenticeships. The section on student aid takes up over half the analysis, largely because – as the report points out:

Looking across all party platforms, one is struck by how much the cost of postsecondary education dominates all other issues. Indeed, one might be forgiven for thinking this was the only issue that mattered to federal parties.

Details on education transfers are notable for their absence in the Conservative and Liberal platforms and for their incoherence in the New Democrat one. Apart from a Conservative regurgitation of last month’s budget, policies on scientific research are essentially absent. And everyone apparently thinks Apprenticeships are a Good Thing but not so good as to actually require policy. Apart from these topics, only the New Democrats have shown any ambition at all in the area, with their promises on childcare and Aboriginal Education. Within PSE itself, the lack of vision and ideas is palpable.

The upshot is that federal approaches to higher education amount to this: The Conservatives are offering slight tweaks to the existing student aid system, while the NDP are proposing to just throw more cash at it. The HESA analysis credits the Liberals with having “the most intriguing and certainly the best thought-out” platform regarding student aid; the Learning Passport idea is the only one that hints at re-imagining the way student aid works, and the only one that promises to inject even a modicum of progressivity into the system.

But overall, the analysis is pretty depressing. Jean Chretien was the last prime minister to make a serious effort at providing federal leadership in higher education and to have a vision for the role higher education can play in a modern economy, but that was fifteen years ago. Since then, federal policy has been a wasteland of boutique tax breaks and minor tweaks to student aid. Any grander conviction that a country’s universities are among its most crucial institutions, and that supporting those institutions is in the national interest, is completely absent.

Metablog: Adding to Wells on Ivison on Naylor

By Andrew Potter - Monday, October 19, 2009 at 4:55 PM - 4 Comments

Colleague Wells points us to what I agree is a very good piece by Ivison on David Naylor’s visit to Ottawa. Toward the end of his column, Ivison references a piece on the recession and higher education, written by Alex Usher and Ryan Dunn of the Educational Policy Institute.

Alex has a piece in the recent 50th anniversary issue of University Affairs, which looks at the main trends driving higher education in Canada (and the world) right now; the article is one of those science-fictiony things where Alex writes as if it is 2034 and he’s looking back at how current trends played out over the next few decades. It’s all pretty smart, but here’s what I think is the part most relevant to Naylor’s agenda:

Institutional mistrust of government, and mutual mistrust between the federal and provincial levels of government, had stymied the development of a national quality-assurance system. And sheer inertia had stalled any changes to credit definitions or adoption of a European-style process for common degree outcomes across institutions.

Moreover, few Canadian institutions had made serious investments in a presence abroad (let alone set up campuses) and almost none had experience in promoting themselves abroad in a way that could challenge the American, British and Australian universities that dominated the market. So, what many universities had thought of as their “Plan B” in the event of government cutbacks – foreign student recruitment – turned out not to be viable.

Here’s the full article.

Tiers of Academe

By Andrew Potter - Thursday, August 27, 2009 at 9:41 AM - 14 Comments

There’s been a lot of free-floating hand-wringing in the wake of a proposal to have Canada concentrate its research spending in a relatively few universities. Most of the complaints have been about the dangers of “elitism” — as if university was about something else. Canada already has a de facto two-tiered university system, and within each university, there is a two- if not three-tiered hierarchy of instructors. The solecism the five schools seem to have made is a) pointing it out, and b) suggesting that we might as well acknowledge the hierarchy and make our funding formulae reflect it.

Except not so fast, Alex Usher argues. The real problem, he says, is that “almost nobody in this country has a real idea what works and what doesn’t in terms of research and innovation policy.”

The fact that faculty with stronger research records would migrate to the big five while everyone else would have to sit tight, make do with less research money and, you know, actually teach some undergraduates might be massively inconvenient for all those second-tier universities trying to raise their research profiles, but it might be quite efficient from the point of view of public expenditure.

Or not. Despite the billions spent every year, we just don’t know.