Category: One Thought to Start Your Day

  • Re: University | Join the Conversation Before It’s Too Late

    Re: University | Join the Conversation Before It’s Too Late

    Hello Everyone,

    The Re: University team here! I know you didn’t expect to hear from us this week, but we just passed the 100-day mark until the Re: University conference and the excitement is getting real. For those of you who don’t know, we are hosting the conference in the Marriott Ottawa on January 28th and 29th. 

    Our full agenda will be released soon but we have begun announcing our speakers and themes. Our two-day agenda is focused on exploration and action.

    •  Day One looks outward and forward. Through provocative plenaries, global case spotlights, and rapid-fire exchanges, participants will examine how universities are adapting to shifting financial realities, emerging technologies, and new models of teaching and learning. The focus is on ideas: what’s possible, what’s working elsewhere, and what change might look like in practice. 
    • Day Two turns those ideas into strategy. Sessions will focus on the “how” of transformation, think: governance, funding models, partnerships, and culture change. Participants will dig into what it takes to move from experimentation to execution and build institutions that are both resilient and ready for the future. While we may be biased, it is an incredible lineup so far. 

    So if you haven’t already, you should check out who is on the agenda so far here.

    We also wanted to give you a heads up that we are 90% sold out of tickets so if you are planning to come, please make sure to get your ticket soon.

    The university is the focal point of this conference, although we have others attending from the college sector,  and we are so happy to say we have representatives from nearly 50 Canadian universities. If your institution isn’t on this list, we would love you to be part of the conversation:

    Algoma University

    Ambrose University

    Brock University

    Capilano University

    Carleton University

    Concordia University

    Dalhousie University

    Emily Carr University of Art and Design

    Kwantlen Polytechnic university

    Lakehead University

    McMaster University

    Memorial University of Newfoundland

    Mount Allison University

    Mount Royal University

    Mount Saint Vincent University

    Nipissing University

    Northeastern University

    Ontario College of Art & Design University

    Ontario Tech University

    Pacific Coast University for Workplace Health Sciences

    Queen’s University

    Saint Mary’s University

    Simon Fraser University

    St. Francis Xavier University

    St. Jerome’s University

    Thompson Rivers University

    Toronto Metropolitan University

    Trent University

    Université de l’Ontario français

    Université de Moncton

    Université de Montréal

    University College of the North

    University of Alberta

    University of British Columbia

    University of Calgary

    University of Guelph

    University of Guelph-Humber

    University of Manitoba

    University of Northern British Columbia

    University of Ottawa

    University of Regina

    University of Saskatchewan

    University of Toronto

    University of Victoria

    University of Waterloo

    Western University

    Wilfrid Laurier University

    York University

    Yorkville University

    We have been asked who should attend this conference and although it is open to anyone with an interest in the future of postsecondary education, we wanted to give you an idea of who will be joining these conversations. 

    40% of these attendees come from the President, Vice-President and Associate Vice-President portfolios, another 40% are Deans and Deputy Deans. The remaining 20% come from a wide range of roles such as CAOs, Special Advisors, Managers, Directors, Professors and many other important roles. We have attendees from institutions coast to coast with representatives also from colleges and polytechnics along with government, associations and various industry stakeholders. And not to forget our partners who we know are looking forward to meeting you all. Check them out here.

    Whoever you are, if you are passionate about the future of the university in Canada then now is the time to get involved in the conversation. 

    We hope to see you there,

    The Re: University Team

    Thank you to our partners:

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  • That Alberta Post-Secondary Review, Again

    That Alberta Post-Secondary Review, Again

    Just before I headed out on a work/vacation trip (I’m in Costa Rica today), the Government of Alberta dropped the report of the Expert Panel on Post-Secondary Institution Funding and Alberta’s Competitiveness, which I had previewed back here when the panel was formed about a year ago. So, on the way to the airport, I dashed off this blog to give you all the skinny. 

    First: it’s a good report! Might be the most sensible report on PSE that’s come out in Canada for quite some time, not least for the ways the Panel went beyond its mandate and actually addressed the elephant in the room, which was “how is Alberta going to educate this huge wave of students heading its way?” – a point which the government pointedly omitted from the Panel’s terms of reference. There are a few things in here which I think are a bit under-thought, which I will address below. But in the main, this is a report which you could apply in almost every province and we’d have a much better system than we have now.

    The report starts by laying out what it calls a “framework” for policy, which should:

    • Provide a space for every qualified Alberta student who wants to pursue post-secondary education (though, this could be quite expensive…I think it was a deliberate political choice to not include any costing in this document)
    • Focus on outcomes, providing incentives and rewarding performance in three key areas: teaching and student experience, research, and the impact institutions have on the communities they serve.
    • Set tuition in a manner that balances the importance of certainty for students with the reality of increasing costs in institutions.
    • Encourage government to reconsider the extent of controls it exercises over institutions, and reduce unnecessary red tape, so as to provide institutions with the autonomy and flexibility they need.

    See? All eminently sensible. But, of course, the devil is in the details, which the panel outlines in eleven specific recommendations. Seven of these are so sensible that they barely require comment. These include recommendation 3 (improve funding and administration of apprenticeship programs), recommendation 4 (fund IT infrastructure on a long-term basis rather than via ongoing operating funding), recommendation 6 (bring back student grants!), recommendation 7 (more international students!), recommendation 8 (government to back off, provide institutions with more autonomy), recommendation 9 (less red tape for institutions), and recommendation 10 (faster government approval of new programs).

    So far, so good. The remaining four recommendations present some complications, though. I’ll go through them one by one.

    Recommendation 1 suggests that Alberta should adopt an actual funding formula to divide public spending between institutions (it is currently one of the largest jurisdictions in the world without one; to my knowledge only BC is bigger). It further suggests that the formula consists of three components: weighted enrolment, (i.e. weighted to recognize that clinical education costs more than laboratory education which costs more than classroom education), performance (assuming the indicators are smart and measurable, which the panel suggests might not be the case for all the indicators in the current performance-based funding arrangement), and a “base” funding component. 

    All fine in principle, but two points. First, when you have institutions as disparate in size as Alberta does (50K at University of Alberta to 1300 at the Alberta University of the Arts), a “base” component is hard to design properly. The idea is to recognize that institutions have fixed costs that probably won’t get covered properly under an enrolment-weighted formula alone but that’s hard to do in a way that actually works but doesn’t wildly subvert any normal principles of equity  (I know, I tried sketching one for the Manitoba College system a decade ago, and it’s hard). Second – and somewhat relatedly – the Panel skips over the bit where a previous government within the last decade tried to do develop a formula much like this one and discovered that any sensible enrolment-weighted system would probably eviscerate two or three of the smaller regional colleges, which was seen as impractical from a political POV (the Minister of the Day trashed the report without publishing it, which is why you may not have heard this story). The math and politics won’t have changed, so getting this idea up and running might be easier said than done.

    Onwards to recommendation 2, which asks the government to introduce targeted, time-limited funding initiatives to a) attract top research talent, b) support innovation and developing technology, and c) provide incentives and support for collaboration among institutions. The ideas are fine, but the logic for time-limiting the measure seems obscure to me.

    Now to recommendation 5, on tuition fees. This is where the report is at its hand-waviest, and I think there is a lot of subtext here which is not fully explained. Currently, there is a 2% cap on all tuition increases. The panel wants that to be maintained for students once they have begun their studies, so as to give them “price stability”. But they also think that institutions should be given “discretion” to raise tuition for first-year students more radically year-by-year, because institutions need money.

    Here’s where it gets handwave-y. The panel does not advocate for de-regulation; whether out of conviction or political realism I can’t say. Rather, it suggests that the Alberta government should set “maximum allowable tuition” every year, on a field of study basis, and institutions should have the freedom to set tuition fees up to that maximum. I think the logic at work here is the same as that seen in the UK in both the 2006 and 2012 fee reforms, which was that if the government set a maximum, institutions would have space to “compete on price” and the big prestigious universities would be able to charge a quality premium.  As we saw in the UK, though, this is a naïve assumption: since price tends to act as a proxy for quality in the public mind (because God forbid anyone actually try to measure quality), what happens in these situations is that all institutions will quickly drive to the max, meaning that in effect, it’s still government setting the fees, with all the politics that entails (decent chance the maximum will be $0 if/when the NDP return to power). I am not sure this has been well thought-through.

    Anyways, on to the final recommendation, which is that on Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (which, it should be noted, was also not part of the Panel’s mandate). In the discussion section, it cites mostly American examples, argues for “institutional neutrality” with respect to political issues (this means no boycotts, apparently, although I suspect if the panel told Alberta’s Ukrainian community that U of A was going to be forced to maintain relations with Russian universities on grounds of institutional neutrality, there would be riots). It also makes veiled references to “federal research grant requirements, which require explicit commitments to equity, diversity and inclusion as part of their selection and approval process…[which] can limit academic freedom and direct the focus of research”. So far, so Alberta.

    But then if you look at the actual recommendation, there are two points to make. The first is that the panel chooses to place “Indigenization” as a separate category from the rest of EDI (they don’t quite say Indigenization = good, EDI = bad, but you’d be forgiven for thinking that this is in fact the panel’s view). And the second is that the actual recommendation is pretty anodyne. It’s written in such a way that allows the anti-woke to claim that we need constant vigilance and for institutions to be able to hit the snooze button and go back to sleep because they already do what is being recommended. Not quite a nothing burger, but pretty close.

    In any event: it’s a solid report and while I think there will be one or two twists and complications in implementation, the direction in which it points is a promising one. Hopefully the government will accept the report and get to work on it as soon as possible.

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  • Newfoundland and Labrador Manifestos, 2025

    Newfoundland and Labrador Manifestos, 2025

    Ok, folks, today is voting day in Newfoundland and Labrador, and so, as usual, it’s time to look at manifesto promises with respect to post-secondary education.

    Newfoundland is feeling pretty good these days. Just five years ago it was living with a budget deficit of about $1 billion, and the only reason it was that low was because of a federal bailout for the Muskrat Falls dam. Now, the province *almost* has a balanced budget, it has the fastest-growing provincial economy in the country (I know, low bar, but still), and it has a new Memorandum of Understanding with Hydro-Quebec to replace the Upper Churchill contract which will – in theory at least – transform provincial finances, though not everyone is convinced. The debt load is still considerable ($47 billion) and servicing that debt takes up more money than the province spends on education. But who cares about long-term problems when there are votes to be bought…er…sought?

    Let’s start with the commitments New Democratic Party, which usually wins at least one or two seats in the House of Assembly. They promise three things with respect to post-secondary education. First, they want to reverse the Liberals’ decision to let tuition rise after a 20-year freeze. Because of the deeply opaque way the NDP’s presents its costing data, it is unclear if the NDP intends to actually reimburse College of the North Atlantic (CNA) and Memorial for this or if it is simply going to tell them to eat it (a little back-of-the-envelope math suggests the rise tuition is bringing in somewhere between $20-$25 million/yr by my estimation). Second, it is going to pay CAN $10/million to increase trades training. And third, it is going to find a way to give healthcare students paid work terms.

    Now, over to the Conservative Party, which does occasionally win elections (in fact it won three in a row in 2003, 2007 and 2011, and held power for 12 years). Oddly, the Conservatives have published a document called “Platform Highlights” but not an actual platform. The party seems to be running on strictly three planks made up of precisely one adjective and one noun (“Better Healthcare”, “Safer Communities” and “Lower Taxes”). Post-secondary students get in on the action, but not institutions. Like the NDP, they want to provide paid work terms for students (though in the Conservatives’ case this doesn’t seem to be limited to health care). They also want to “guarantee jobs for students training in a program where there are staff shortages” (this does seem to be limited to health care), and finally, provide a tuition refund for graduates who work in the province. This is, of course, a policy which, as I have explained on more than one occasion, is as dumb as a bag of hammers. 

    So, now over to the governing Liberals, whose pitch can be summed up as “we signed an MOU with Hydro-Quebec to re-up the Churchill Falls agreement and boy are we going to be rich!” Yet, perhaps because of the enormous debt, while the Liberals are making a lot of promises, a lot of them are pretty small ball. A million here, a million there – in the big scheme of things, it’s fairly restrained. (Aside: one of the more interesting provincial pledges I have seen anywhere in recent years is the Liberal pledge on the Technology and Defense sectors, which I think points to an interesting possible future where National Security actually comes to be seen as an area where provinces have some agency and some responsibility).

    Anyways, back to post-secondary education, where the Liberal manifesto promises, as I say, are pretty restrained. It basically comes down to three things. First, the Liberals promise to cover all the costs of tuition associated with all practicum courses for Newfoundland and Labrador nursing students, and offer all graduating nurses full-time permanent positions in Newfoundland and Labrador. Second, they want to create a one-time moving allowance of up to $500 per student for rural students to assist with moving costs to study in St. John’s. And third, they are going to work with Memorial and CNA to expand capacity in certain fields related to new construction in Churchill Falls.

    In other words, friends: today’s vote in Newfoundland is another episode in that continuing tradition of the New Canadian Post-Secondary Consensus, in which every party in every province believes that:

    1)      Money for students is good while money for institutions is not, and

    2)      To the extent post-secondary education has value, it is exclusively related to Nursing and the Construction Trades.

    So, God guard thee, Newfoundland. And God help us all if, as seems increasingly likely, this is the future of Canadian post-secondary education.

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  • That Was The Quarter That Was, Summer 2025

    That Was The Quarter That Was, Summer 2025

    Welcome to TWTQTW for June-September. Things were a little slow in July, but with back to school happening in most of the Northern Hemisphere sometime between last August and late September, the stories began pouring in. 

    You might think that “back to school” would deliver up lots of stories about enrolment trends, but you’d mostly be wrong. While few countries are as bad as Canada when it comes to up-to date enrolment data, it’s a rare country that can give you good enrolment information in September. What you tend to get are what I call “mood” pieces looking backwards and forwards on long-term trends: this is particularly true in places like South Korea, where short-term trends are not bad (international students are backfilling domestic losses nicely for the moment) but the long-term looks pretty awful. Taiwan, whose demographic crisis is well known, saw a decline of about 7% in new enrolments, but there were also some shock declines in various parts of the world: Portugal, Denmark, and – most surprisingly – Pakistan. 

    Another perennial back-to-school story has to do with tuition fees. Lots of stories here. Ghana announced a new “No Fees Stress” policy in which first-year students could get their fees refunded. No doubt it’s a policy which students will enjoy, but this policy seems awfully close in inspiration to New Zealand’s First Year Free policy which famously had no effect whatsoever on access. But, elsewhere, tuition policy seems to be moving in the other direction. In China, rising fees at top universities sparked fears of an access gap and, in Iran, the decision of Islamic Azad University (a sort-of private institution that educates about a quarter of all Iranian youth) to continue raising tuition (partly in response to annual inflation rates now over 40%) has led to widespread dissatisfaction. Finally, tuition rose sharply in Bulgaria after the Higher Education Act was amended to link fees to government spending (i.e. more government spending, more fees). After student protests, the government moved to cut tuition by 25% from its new level, but this still left tuition substantially above where it was the year before.

    On the related issue of Student Aid, three countries stood out. The first was Kazakhstan, where the government increased domestic student grants increased by 61% but also announced a cut in the government’s famous study-abroad scheme which sends high-potential youth to highly-ranked foreign universities. 

    Perhaps the most stunning change occurred in Chile, where two existing student aid programs were replaced by a new system called the Fondo para la Educación Superior (FES), which is arguably unique in the world. The idea is to replace the existing system of student loans with a graduate tax: students who obtain funds through the FES will be required to pay a contribution of 10% of marginal income over about US$515/week for a period of twenty years. In substance, it is a lot like the Yale Tuition Postponement Plan, which has never been replicated at a national level because of the heavy burden placed on high income earners. A team from UCL in London analyzed the plan and suggested that it will be largely self-supporting – but only because high-earning graduates in professional fields will pay in far more than they receive, thus creating a question of potential self-selection out of the program.

    In Colombia, Congress passed a law mandating ICETEX (the country’s student loan agency which mostly services students at private universities) to lower interest rates, offer generous loan forgiveness and adopt an income-contingent repayment system. However, almost simultaneously, the Government of Gustavo Petro actually raised student loan interest rates because it could no longer afford to subsidize them. This story has a ways to run, I think.

    On to the world government cutbacks. In the Netherlands, given the fall of the Schoof government and the call for elections this month, universities might reasonably have expected to avoid trouble in a budget delivered by a caretaker government. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case: instead, the 2026 imposed significant new cuts on the sector. In Argentina, Congress passed a law that would see higher education spending rise to 1% of GDP (roughly double the current rate). President Milei vetoed the law, but Congress overturned President Milei’s veto. In theory, that means a huge increase in university funding. But given the increasing likelihood of a new economic collapse in Argentina, it’s anyone’s guess how fulfilling this law is going to work out.

    One important debate that keeps popping up in growing higher education systems is the trade-off between quality and quantity with respect to institutions: that is, to focus money on a small number of high-quality institutions or a large number of, well, mediocre ones. Back in August, the Nigerian President, under pressure from the National Assembly to open hundreds of new universities to meet growing demand, announced a seven-year moratorium on the formation of new federal universities (I will eat several articles of clothing if there are no new federal universities before 2032). Conversely, in Peru, a rambunctious Congress passed laws to create 22 new universities in the face of Presidential reluctance to spread funds too thinly. 

    The newson Graduate Outcomes is not very good, particularly in Asia. In South Korea, youth employment rates are lower than they have been in a quarter-century, and the unemployment rate among bachelor’s grads is now higher than for middle-school grads. This is leading many to delay graduation. The situation in Singapore is not quite as serious but is still bad enough to make undergraduates fight for spots in elite “business cubs”. In China, the government was sufficiently worried about the employment prospects of the spring 2025 graduating class that it ordered some unprecedented measures to find them jobs, but while youth employment stayed low (that is, about 14%) at the start of the summer, the rate was back up to 19% by August. Some think these high levels of unemployment are changing Chinese society for good. Over in North America, the situation is not quite as dire, but the sudden inability of computer science graduates to find jobs seems deeply unfair to a generation that was told “just learn how to code”. 

    Withrespect to Research Funding and Policy, the most gobsmacking news came from Switzerland where the federal government decided to slash the budget of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) by 20%. In Australia, the group handling the Government’s Strategic Examination of Research and Development released six more “issue” papers which, amongst other things, suggested forcing institutions to choose particular areas of specialization in areas of government “priority”, a suggestion which was echoed in the UK both by the new head of UK Research and Innovation and the President of Universities UK.     

    But, of course, in terms of the politicization of research, very little can match the United States. In July, President Trump issued an Executive Order which explicitly handed oversight of research grants at the many agencies which fund extramural research to political appointees who would vet projects to ensure that they were in line with Trump administration priorities. Then, on the 1st of October (technically not Q3, but it’s too big a story to omit), the White House floated the idea of a “compact” with universities, under which institutions would agree to a number of conditions including shutting down departments that “punish, belittle” or “spark violence against conservative ideas” in return for various types of funding. Descriptions of the compact from academics ranged from “rotten” to “extortion”. At the time of writing, none of the nine institutions to which this had initially been floated had given the government an answer.

    And that was the quarter that was.

     

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  • Three Notable StatsCan Papers | HESA

    Three Notable StatsCan Papers | HESA

    Over the summer, Statistics Canda put out a few papers on higher education and immigration which got zero press but nevertheless are interesting enough that I thought you might all want to hear about them. Below are my précis: 

    The first paper, Recent trends in immigration from Canada to the United States by Feng Hou, Milly Yang and Yao Lu, is a very general look at outbound migration to the United States, looking  specifically at the characteristics of Canadian citizens who applying for labour certification in the United States in 2015 and in 2024. I found the three top-line results all somewhat surprising.

    • The number of US certification applicants declined by just over 25% between 2015 and 2024.
    • Outbound migration to the US by Canadians is predominantly a “new” Canadian thing. In 2015, Canadian citizens born outside Canada made up 54% of those seeking certification, and by 2024 that proportion had increased to nearly 60%.
    • Among Canadians seeking US certification in 2015, 41% had a master’s or doctoral degree.  In 2024, that proportion had fallen to 31%.

    In other words, brain drain to the US changed significantly over the space of a decade: fewer Canadians headed south, and among those who did, declining proportions were Canadian-born or held advance degrees. All somewhat surprising.

    The second paper, Fields of study and occupations of immigrants who were international students in Canada before immigration by Youjin Choi and Li Xu, divides out two recent cohorts (2011-15 and 2016-21) of immigrants and starts to tease out various aspects of their current status in Canada.  Here the key findings were:

    • In the 2011-15 period, 13% of all immigrants were former international students. By the 2016-21 period, that number had risen to 23%.
    • About a third of immigrants who were students in Canada say their highest degree was taken outside Canada. It’s a bit difficult to parse this. It may mean, for instance, that they obtained a bachelor’s degree in Canada, went to another country for their master’s degree and came back; it may also mean that they took a master’s degree abroad and took some kind of short post-graduate certificate here.
    • A little over a third of all immigrants who studied in Canada have a STEM degree, a proportion that increased a tiny bit over time. This is higher than for the Canadian-born population, but not hugely different from that of immigrants who did not study here.
    • A little under half of all former international STEM students in the immigrant pool were working in a STEM field, but this is strongly correlated with the level of education. Among sub-Bachelor’s graduates this proportion was a little over 20%, while among those with a Master’s degree or higher it was over 50%. This is significantly higher than it is for Canadian-born post-secondary graduates. In non-STEM fields, the relationship is reversed (i.e. Canadian-born graduates are more likely to be working in an aligned field).

    In other words, former international students are a rising proportion of all immigrants, a high proportion are STEM graduates, and a high proportion of them go on to work in STEM fields. All signs that policy is pushing results in the intended direction.

    The final paper, Retention of science, technology, engineering, mathematics and computer science graduates in Canada by Youjin Choi and Feng Hou, follows three cohorts of both domestic and international student graduates to see whether they stayed in the country (technically, it measures the proportion of graduates who file tax returns in Canada, which is a pretty good proxy for residency). The results are summed up in one incredibly ugly chart (seriously, why is StatsCan dataviz so awful?), which I reproduce below:

    So, in the chart the Y-axis is the percentage of STEM graduates who stay in Canada (measured by the proxy of tax filing) and the X-axis is years since graduation. Since they are following three different cohorts of graduates, the lines don’t all extend to the same length (the earliest cohort could be followed for ten years, the middle for seven and the most recent for just three).  The red set of lines represents outcomes for Canadian-born students and the blue set of lines does the same for international students.

    So, the trivial things this graph shows are that: i) both Canadian and international students leave Canada but ii) international students do so more frequently and iii) leaving the country is something that happens gradually over time. The interesting thing it shows, though, is that the most recent cohort (class of 2018) of STEM graduates are more likely to stay than earlier ones, and that this is especially true for international students: the retention rate of international graduates from the class of 2018 was almost fifteen percentage points higher than for the class of 2015.

    Was it a more welcoming economy? Maybe. But you’d have to think that our system of offering international students a path to citizenship had something to do with it too.

    Two other nuggets in the paper:

    • Canadian-born STEM graduates are slightly more likely to leave than non-STEM graduates (it’s not a huge difference, just a percentage point or two) while among international student graduates, those from STEM programs are substantially less likely to leave than those from non-STEM fields (a fifteen-point gap or more).
    • Regardless of where they are from, and regardless of what they studied, graduates from “highly-ranked” universities (no definition given, unfortunately) were more likely to leave Canada, presumably because degree prestige confers a certain degree of mobility.

    You are now fully up to date on the latest data on domestic and international graduates and their immigration pathways. Enjoy your day.

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  • Notes on Research Policy, Here and Abroad

    Notes on Research Policy, Here and Abroad

    Hi all. I thought I would take some time to have a chat about how research policy is evolving in other countries, because I think there are some lessons we need to learn here in Canada.

    One piece of news that struck me this week came from Switzerland, where the federal government is slashing the budget of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) by 20%. If the Swiss, a technological powerhouse of a nation, with a broad left-right coalition in power and a more or less balanced budget, are cutting back on science like this, then we might all have to re-think the idea that being anti-Science is just a manifestation of right-wing populism. Higher education as a whole has some thinking to do.

    And right now, two countries are in fact re-thinking science quite a bit. In the UK, the new head of UK Research and Innovation (roughly, that country’s One Big Granting Council), has told institutions that they might need to start “doing fewer things but doing them well”, to which the President of Universities UK and vice-chancellor of Manchester Metropolitan University Malcom-Press added that he was “hearing from government is that [they] don’t want to be investing in areas of research where we don’t have the quality and we don’t have the scale.” And, the kicker: “You can’t have hobbyist research that’s unfunded going on in institutions. We can’t afford it.”

    Over to Australia, where a few months ago the government set up a Strategic Examination of Research and Development, which released a discussion paper, held consultations and got feedback (which it published) and has now released six more “issue” papers for consultation which detail government thinking in many different and more detailed ways. If this sounds magical to you, it is because you are from Canada, where the standard practice for policymaking is to do everything behind closed doors and treat stakeholders like mushrooms (in the dark with only fecal matter for company) instead of a place where policy-making is treated as a serious endeavour in which public input and expert advice is welcomed. 

    For today’s purposes however, what matters is not process but policy. The review is seriously considering a number of fairly radical ideas, such as creating a few national “focus areas” for research funding, which would attract higher rates of overhead and requiring institutions to focus their efforts in one of these priority areas via mission-based compacts (which are sort of like Ontario’s Multi-Year Agreements, only they are meaningful) so as to build scale and specialization. 

    Whew.

    One thing that strikes me as odd about both the UK and Australian line of thinking is the idea that institutional specialization matters all that much. While lots of research is done at the level of the individual lab, most “big science” – the stuff people who dream about specialization have in mind when the talk about science – happens in teams which span many institutions, and more often than not across national borders as well. I get the sense that the phenomenon of institutional rankings have fried policy makers’ brains somewhat: they seem to think that the correct way to think about science is at the level of the institution, rather than labs or networks of laboratories. It’s kind of bananas. We can be glad that this kind of thinking has not infected Canadian policy too much because the network concept is more ingrained here.

    Which brings me to news here at home. 

    The rumour out of Ottawa is that in the next few months (still not clear if this is going to be fall 2025 or Spring 2026) there will be an announcement of a new envelope of money for research. But very definitely not inquiry-driven research. No, this is money which the feds intend to spend as part of the increase in “defence” spending which is supposed to rise to 2% of GDP by 2025-2026 and 5% by 2035. So, the kinds of things it will need to go to will be “security”, likely defined relatively generously. It will be for projects in space, protection of critical infrastructure, resiliency, maybe energy production, etc.  I don’t think this is going to be all about STEM and making widgets – there will be at least some room for social science in these areas and maybe humanities, too, though this seems to me a harder pitch to make. It is not clear from what I have heard if this is going to be one big pie or a series of smaller pies, divided up wither by mission or by existing granting council. But the money does seem to be on its way.

    Now before I go any further, I should point out that I have not heard anyone say that these new research envelopes are actually going to contain new money beyond what was spent in 2024-25.  As I pointed out a couple of weeks ago, that would be hard to square with the government’s deficit-fighting commitments.

    In fact, if I had to guess right now, the best-case scenario would be that the Liberals will do this by taking some or all of the 88% of the Budget 2024 research commitment to the tri-councils and push it into these new envelopes (worst-case scenario: they nuke the 88% of the 2024 Budget commitment they haven’t yet spent and claw back money from existing commitments to make these new envelopes). 

    So, obviously no push here for institutional specialization, but where our debate echoes those of the UK and Australia is that all three governments seem to want to shift away from broad-based calls for inquiry driven research and toward more mission-based research in some vaguely defined areas of national priority.  I know this is going to irritate and anger many people, but genuinely I don’t see many politically practical alternatives right now. As I said back here: if defending existing inquiry-driven tri-council budgets is the hill the sector chooses to die on, we’re all going to be in big trouble. 

    No one will forcing individual researchers or institutions to be part of this shift to mission-driven research, but clearly that’s where the money is going to be. So, my advice to VPs Research is: get your ducks in a row on this now. Figure out who in your institution does anything that can even tangentially be referred to as “security-enhancing”. Figure out what kinds of pitches you might want to make.  Start testing your elevator pitches. There will be rewards to first movers in this area.

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  • How About Grade 13? | HESA

    How About Grade 13? | HESA

    Hey everyone, quick bit of exciting Re: University news before we get started. Our speakers are beginning to go live on the site here. We’ll be shouting them out on the blog over the next few weeks, so watch this space. Also, a huge thanks to our many dynamic partners and sponsors for making it all happen, check them out here. And of course, thank you to everyone who has already grabbed a ticket, we are already 75% sold out and we are looking forward to having some very interesting conversations with you in January. Anyway, on with the blog…

    Question:  What policy would increase student preparation for post-secondary education, thus lowering dropouts and average time-to-completion while at the same time lowering per-student delivery costs?

    Answer: Introducing (or re-introducing) Grade 13 and move (or return) to make 3-year degrees the norm.

    It’s a policy that has so many benefits it’s hard to count them all. 

    Let’s start with the basic point that older students on the whole are better-prepared students. In North America, we ask students to grow up and make decisions about academics and careers awfully early. In some parts of the world, they deal with this by having students take “gap years” to sort themselves out. In North America we are very Calvinist (not the good kind) about work and study, and think of tie off just to mature and think as “wasteful”, so we drive them from secondary school to university/college as fast as possible. 

    But there’s no reason that the line between secondary and post-secondary education needs to be where it is today. In antebellum America, the line was in people’s early teens; and age 18 wasn’t an obvious line until after World War II (Martin Luther King Jr. started at Morehead College age 15 because it decided to start taking high school juniors). The Philippines drew the line after 10 years of schooling until about six years ago. Ontario’s elimination of grade 13 was one of the very few examples anywhere in the world of a jurisdiction deciding to roll the age of transition backwards.

    But it’s not clear in Ontario – which has now run this experiment for nearly 25 years – that the system is better off if you make students go to post-secondary education at 18 rather than 19. If you give students an extra year to mature, they probably have a better sense of what specific academic subjects actually consist of and how they lead to various careers. Because they have a better sense of what they want to do with their lives, they study with more purpose. They are more engaged. And almost everything we know about students suggests that more engaged students are easier to teach, switch programs less often, and drop out less frequently. 

    These all seem like good outcomes that we threw away for possibly no good reason.

    Students would spend another year at home. Not all of them would enjoy that, but their parents’ pocket-books sure would. They’d also spend one more year in classes of approximately thirty instead of classes of approximately three hundred. Again, this seems like a good thing.

    And as for cost, well, the per-student cost of secondary education is significantly lower than that of the per-student cost of post-secondary education. I don’t just mean for families, for whom the cost of secondary school is zero. I also mean for governments who are footing the bill for the post-secondary part of the equation, too (at least this is the case everywhere outside Ontario, which has abysmal levels of per-student spending on public post-secondary education). 

    There really is only one problem with moving from a 6+6+4 system of education to a 6+7+3 system.  It’s not that a three-year degree is inherently bad or inadequate. Quebec has a 6+5+2+3 system and as far as I know no one complains. Hell, most of Europe, and to some extent Manitoba, are on a 6+6+3 system and no one blinks. 

    No, the problem is space. Add another year of secondary school and you need bigger secondary schools. And no one is likely to want to get into that, particularly when the system is already bursting – in most of the country, particularly in western Canada – from a wave of domestic enrolments. It is possible that some universities and colleges could convert some of their space to house high schools (the University of Winnipeg has quite a nice one in Wesley Hall), but that wouldn’t be a universal solution. Architecture and infrastructure in this case act as a limiting factor on policy change. However, by the early-to-mid 2030s when secondary student and then post-secondary numbers level off or even start to decline again, that excuse will be gone. Why wouldn’t we consider this?

    (Technically another potential solution here of is to adopt something like a CEGEP, since these which arguably bridge the gap between secondary and university better that grade 13 did. But the real estate/infrastructure demands of creating a new class of institutions probably make that a non-starter).

    Anyways, this is just idle talk. This might be a complete waste of time and money, of course. My suggestions about possible benefits could be totally off. Interestingly, as far as I know, Ontario never did a post-policy implementation review about eliminating grade 13/Ontario Academic Credits. Did we gain or lose as a society? What were the cost implications? Seems like the kind of questions to which you’d want to know the answers (well, I wish I lived in a country that thought these were questions worth answering, anyway). And even if we thought there were benefits to keeping students out of post-secondary for one more year, architectural realities would almost certainly get in the way. 

    But if we’re genuinely interested in thinking about re-making systems of education, these are the sorts of questions we should be asking. Take nothing for granted.

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  • Truth and Reconciliation, Ten Years On

    Truth and Reconciliation, Ten Years On

    Today is September 30th, National Day for Truth and Reconciliation and Orange Shirt Day. It has been just over ten years since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission issued its report, and so this seemed like a good time to review the state of Truth and Reconciliation – and Indigenous issues generally – on Canadian campuses. So, I am teaming up today with Mark Solomon, Associate Vice-President Reconciliation and Inclusion at Seneca Polytechnic to put together some thoughts on what progress we have made over the last decade.

    Let’s start with the TRC Calls to Action which have to do with post-secondary education. These can be broken down into two parts. The first is a call (#7) to the Federal Government (not institutions, interestingly) to develop with Aboriginal groups a joint strategy to eliminate educational and employment gaps between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians. Now, while a lot of talking has been done about this, it’s hard to say that anything resembling a strategy has emerged. Partly, that’s because the feds don’t want to spend a boatload of new money and partly it is because Indigenous groups across the country don’t all agree on what that strategy should be. One sticking point seems to be the relative prominence of Indigenous vs. mainstream institutions in closing the education gap and thus implicitly how generously to fund the former. Another is that while the federal government has a treaty relationship to provide education (K-PSE) for Indigenous learners, actualizing that responsibility to some extent requires coordination with provinces and territories, which isn’t exactly the feds’ strong suit these days.

    That doesn’t mean that nothing has happened on this front. The Post-Secondary Student Support Program (PSSP) for Status First Nations students was augmented substantially in Budget 2019, though inflation has since eaten away most of the value of the extra money. The federal government also provided new funding to Inuit and Métis students, thus to some extent fulfilling Call #11 on adequate funding for Indigenous students, though most would still say the funding is still inadequate. The question is: has any of this led to a closing of the access gap? 

    As Figure 1 shows, the answer is no, or at least not yet. Indigenous educational attainment rates are growing, particularly at the college level, but the total post-secondary attainment gap has increased a tiny bit, from 15 to 16 percentage points, and the university gap has increased a lot, from 19 to 26 percentage points.

    Figure 1: Higher Educational Attainment Among Off-Reserve Population aged 25-64, 2014, 2019 and 2024

    Let’s turn to the second set of Calls to Action – those Action aimed at institutions. The three big ones were parallel calls aimed at medical/nursing schools (Call 24), law schools (Call 28) and journalism schools (Call 86) to require all law students to take a course in Aboriginal people and the law, which includes the history and legacy of residential schools, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Treaties and Aboriginal rights, Indigenous law, and Aboriginal–Crown relations. This will require skills-based training in intercultural competency, conflict resolution, human rights, and antiracism.

    (Why not social work, or policing? We wondered that too.)

    The website Indigenous Watchdog has been following institutional progress on these areas. As of last year, 22 of 24 Canadian law schools had such mandatory courses, which is pretty good. The country’s 93 nursing schools have not done as well: only 41 are seen as having introduced mandatory courses with the requisite content; 18 have apparently no mandatory course at all and the remainder are somewhere in between. Journalism faculties, similarly, have a fairly spotty record: with 11 apparently meeting all criteria, four meeting partially and six not at all.

    This is where evaluation of progress on reconciliation gets tricky. Lots of these professional programs which did not introduce mandatory courses have, nevertheless, things which they think are relevant to reconciliation. To take merely one of potentially dozens of examples: look at the Journalism School at TMU. There, the course Reporting on Indigenous Issues remains resolutely mandatory but the faculty has put together an interesting website called Reconciling Journalism, which the school hopes will “provide a platform for Indigenous students and host many different student projects on Indigenous issues and communities at Toronto Metropolitan University”  In such a case, should one give TMU points for creativity and good wishes, or take them away for thinking that it knows better than Justice Sinclair what constitutes a contribution to reconciliation?  There is a difference between “Indigenous issues” and “reconciliation” which gets blurred here.

    More broadly: there are many institutions which have done a lot of Nice Symbolic Things for Indigenous peoples over the past decade. Things like Indigenous-language signage at places like Laurentian and UBC, Indigenization of campus architecture and campus planning like at Seneca, Centennial and Calgary. It’s good, but is it reconciliation?  (and also: why is it is easier to change signage and build buildings than change curriculum?). It’s not just symbolic stuff, either. There has been a lot of hiring of Indigenous staff, academic and otherwise.  What one might call “Indigenous lead” positions have been elevated in stature and in general individuals with Indigenous identity are moving closer to the centres of power within institutions. That’s all positive, but actually, none of the TRC calls addressed these issues. Generously, one could see these things as pre-requisites for greater Indigenous participation in higher education (back to Call #7) in the sense that Indigenous students won’t attend if they don’t feel seen or welcome; but even if that’s the case, it doesn’t seem to be working yet. 

    One thing that isn’t symbolic is the notion of “Indigenization” of the curriculum. Call #62 asks federal and provincial governments to provide the necessary funding to post-secondary institutions to educate teachers on how to integrate Indigenous knowledge and teaching methods into classrooms.  That hasn’t happened, of course, but there has been a significant elevation of Indigenous Knowledge within institutions which is worth recognizing. The notion of “Indigenization” of institutions has got stuck in part because no one can agree on what it means nor how it can be measured. Progress here won’t come from a one-size-fits-all approach. More institutional engagement with surrounding Indigenous communities on what that could and should like is necessary because in all likelihood the answer will differ a bit from one place and one set of communities to another.

    Broadly, then, it’s a mixed picture. Arguably, one could say that Canadian post-secondary institutions are doing better on Indigenous issues than they are on Truth and Reconciliation. Room for improvement for sure, but at the same time, it’s worth being mindful of the potential for backsliding, too. All of these measures were taken at a time when university and college budgets were growing; with a long period of budget cuts ahead, we’ll soon see whether or not our institutions view all of these measures as must-haves or just nice-to-haves. Time will tell.

    “Education got us unto this mess and Education will get us out of it” – Justice Murray Sinclair (1951-2024)

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  • Education at a Glance 2025, Part 2

    Education at a Glance 2025, Part 2

    Three weeks ago, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released its annual stat fest, Education at a Glance (see last week’s blog for more on this year’s higher education and financing data). The most interesting thing about this edition is that the OECD chose to release some new data from the recent Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) relating to literacy and numeracy levels that were included in the PIAAC 2013 release (see also here), but not in the December 2024 release.   

    (If you need a refresher: PIAAC is kind of like the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) but for adults and is carried out once a decade so countries can see for themselves how skilled their workforces are in terms of literacy, numeracy, and problem-solving).

    The specific details of interest that were missing in the earlier data release were on skill level by level of education (or more specifically, highest level of education achieved). OECD for some reason cuts the data into three – below upper secondary, upper secondary and post-secondary non-tertiary, and tertiary. Canada has a lot of post-secondary non-tertiary programming (a good chunk of community colleges are described this way) but for a variety of reasons lumps all college diplomas in with university degrees in with university degrees as “tertiary”, which makes analysis and comparison a bit difficult. But we can only work with the data the OECD gives us, so…

    Figures 1, 2 and 3 show PIAAC results for a number of OECD countries, comparing averages for just the Upper Secondary/Post-Secondary Non-Tertiary (which I am inelegantly going to label “US/PSNT”) and Tertiary educational attainment. They largely tell similar stories. Japan and Finland tend to be ranked towards the top of the table on all measures, while Korea, Poland and Chile tend to be ranked towards the bottom. Canada tends to be ahead of the OECD average at both levels of education, but not by much. The gap between US/PSNT and Tertiary results are significantly smaller on the “problem-solving” measure than on the others (which is interesting and arguably does not say very nice things about the state of tertiary education, but that’s maybe for another day). Maybe the most spectacular single result is that Finns with only US/PSNT education have literacy scores higher than university graduates in all but four other countries, including Canada.

    Figure 1: PIAAC Average Literacy Scores by Highest Level of Education Attained, Population Aged 25-64, Selected OECD Countries

    Figure 2: PIAAC Average Numeracy Scores by Highest Level of Education Attained, Population Aged 25-64, Selected OECD Countries

    Figure 3: PIAAC Average Problem Scores by Highest Level of Education Attained, Population Aged 25-64, Selected OECD Countries

    Another thing that is consistent across all of these graphs is that the gap between US/PSNT and tertiary graduates is not at all the same. In some countries the gap is quite low (e.g. Sweden) and in other countries the gap is quite high (e.g. Chile, France, Germany). What’s going on here, and does it suggest something about the effectiveness of tertiary education systems in different countries (i.e. most effective where the gaps are high, least effective where they are low)?

    Well, not necessarily. First, remember that the sample population is aged 25-64, and education systems undergo a lot of change in 40 years (for one thing, Poland, Chile and Korea were all dictatorships 40 years ago). Also, since we know scoring on these kinds of tests decline with age, demographic patterns matter too. Second, the relative size of systems matters. Imagine two secondary and tertiary systems had the same “quality”, but one tertiary system took in half of all high school graduates and the other only took in 10%. Chances are the latter would have better “results” at the tertiary level, but it would be entirely due to selection effects rather than to treatment effects.

    Can we control for these things? A bit. We can certainly control for the wide age-range because OECD breaks down the data by age. Re-doing Figures 1-3, but restricting the age range to 25-34, would at least get rid of the “legacy” part of the problem. This I do below in Figures 4-6. Surprisingly little changes as a result. The absolute scores are all higher, but you’d expect that given what we know about skill loss over time.  Across the board, Canada remains just slightly ahead of the OECD average. Korea does a bit better in general and Italy does a little bit worse, but other than the rank-order of results is pretty similar to what we saw for the general population (which I think is a pretty interesting finding when you think of how much effort countries put in to messing around with their education systems…does any of it matter?)

    Figure 4: PIAAC Average Literacy Scores by Highest Level of Education Attained, Population Aged 25-34, Selected OECD Countries

    Figure 5: PIAAC Average Numeracy Scores by Highest Level of Education Attained, Population Aged 25-34, Selected OECD Countries

    Figure 6: PIAAC Average Problem Scores by Highest Level of Education Attained, Population Aged 25-34, Selected OECD Countries

    Now, let’s turn to the question of whether or not we can control for selectivity. Back in 2013, I tried doing something like that, but it was only possible because OECD released PIAAC scores not just as averages but also in terms of quartile thresholds, and that isn’t the case this time. But what we can do is look a bit at the relationship between i) the size of the tertiary system relative to the size of the US/PSNT system (a measure of selectivity, basically) and ii) the degree to which results for tertiary students are higher than those for US/PSNT. 

    Which is what I do in Figure 7. The X-axis here is selectivity [tertiary attainment rate ÷ US/PSNT attainment rate rate] for 25-34 year olds on (the further right on the graph, the more open-access the system), and the Y-axis is PIAAC gaps Σ [tertiary score – US/PSNT score] across the literacy, numeracy and problem-solving measures (the higher the score, the bigger the gap between tertiary and US/PSNT scores). It shows that countries like Germany, Chile and Italy are both more highly selective and have greater score gaps than countries like Canada and Korea, which are the reverse. It therefore provides what I would call light support for the theory that the less open/more selective a system of tertiary education is, the bigger the gap tertiary between Tertiary and US/PSNT scores on literacy, numeracy and problem-solving scores.  Meaning, basically, beware of interpreting these gaps as evidence of relative system quality: they may well be effects of selection rather than treatment.

    Figure 7: Tertiary Attainment vs. PIAAC Score Gap, 25-34 year-olds

    That’s enough PIAAC fun for one Monday.  See you tomorrow.

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  • Testing Times & Interesting Discussions

    Testing Times & Interesting Discussions

    Last week, The Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) put out a discussion paper called Testing Times: Fending Off A Crisis in Post-Secondary Education, which in part is the outcome of a set of cross-country discussions held this summer by RBC, HESA, and the Business Higher Education Roundtable. (BHER). The paper, I think, sums up the current situation pretty well: the system is not at a starvation point but is heading in that direction pretty quickly and that needs to be rectified. On the other hand, there are some ways that institutions could be moving more quickly to respond to changing social and economic circumstances. What’s great about this paper is that it balances those two ideas pretty effectively.

    I urge everyone to read it themselves because I think it sums up a lot of issues nicely – many of which we at HESA will be taking up at our Re: University conference in January (stay tuned! the nearly full conference line-up will be out in a couple of weeks, and it’s pretty exciting). But I want to draw everyone’s attention to section 4 of the report, in particular which I think is the sleeper issue of the year, and that is the regulation of post-secondary institutions. One of the things we heard a lot on the road was how universities were being hamstrung – not just by governments but by professional regulatory bodies – in terms of developing innovative programming. This is a subject I’ll return to in the next week or two, but I am really glad that this issue might be starting to get some real traction.

    The timing of this release wasn’t accidental: it came just a few days before BHER had one of its annual high-level shindigs, and RBC’s CEO Dave MacKay is also BHER’s Board Chair, so the two go hand-in-hand to some extent. I was at the summit on Monday – a Chatham House rules session at RBC headquarters – which attracted a good number of university and college presidents, as well as CEOs – entitled Strategic Summit on Talent, Technology and a New Economic Order. The discussions took up the challenge in the RBC paper to look at where the country is going and where the post-secondary education sector can contribute to making a new and stronger Canada.

    And boy, was it interesting.

    I mean, partly it was some of the outright protectionist stuff being advocated by the corporate sector in the room. I haven’t heard stuff like that since I was a child. Basically, the sentiment in the room is that the World Trade Organization (WTO) is dead, the Americans aren’t playing by those rules anymore, so why should we? Security of supply > low-cost supply. Personally, I think that likely means that this “new economic order” is going to mean much more expensive wholesale prices, but hey, if that’s what we have to adapt to, that’s what we have to adapt to.

    But, more pertinent to this blog were the ways the session dealt with the issue of what in higher education needs to change to meet the moment. And, for me, what was interesting was that once you get a group of business folks in a room and ask what higher education can do to help get the country on track, they actually don’t have much to say. They will talk a LOT about what government can do to help get the country on track. The stories they can tell about how much more ponderous and anti-innovation Canadian public procurement policies are compared to almost any other jurisdiction on earth would be entertaining if the implications were not so horrific. They will talk a LOT about how Canadian C-suites are risk-averse, almost as risk-averse as government, and how disappointing that is.

    But when it comes to higher education? They don’t actually have all that much to say. And that’s both good and bad.

    Now before I delve into this, let me say that it’s always a bit tricky to generalize what a sector believes based on a small group of CEOs who get drafted into a room like this one. I mean, to some degree these CEOs are there because they are interested in post-secondary education, so they aren’t necessarily very representative of the sector. But here’s what I learned:

    • CEOs are a bit ruffled by current underfunding of higher education. Not necessarily to the point where they would put any of their own political capital on the line, but they are sympathetic to institutions.
    • When they think about how higher education affects their business, CEOs seem to think primarily about human capital (i.e. graduates). They talk a lot less about research, which is mostly what universities want to talk about, so there is a bit of a mismatch there.
    • When they think about human capital, what they are usually thinking about is “can my business have access to skills at a price I want to pay?” Because the invitees are usually heads of successful fast-growing companies, the answer is usually no. Also, most say what they want are “skills” – something they, not unreasonably, equate with experience, which sets up another set of potential misunderstandings with universities because degrees ≠ experience (but it does mean everyone can agree on more work-integrated learning).
    • As a result – and this is important here – it’s best if CEOs think about post-secondary education in terms of firm growth, not in terms of economy-wide innovation.

    Now, maybe that’s all right and proper – after all, isn’t it government’s business to look after the economy-wide stuff? Well, maybe, but here’s where it gets interesting. You can drive innovation either by encouraging the manufacture and circulation of ideas (i.e. research) or by diffusing skills through the economy (i.e. education/training). But our federal government seems to think that innovation only happens via the introduction of new products/technology (i.e., the product of research), and that to the extent there is an issue with post-secondary education, it is that university-based research doesn’t translate into new products fast enough – i.e. the issue is research commercialization. The idea that technological adoption might be the product of governments and firms not having enough people to use new technologies properly (e.g. artificial intelligence)? Not on anyone’s radar screen.

    And that really is a problem. One I am not sure is easily fixed because I am not sure everyone realizes the degree to which they are talking past each other. But that said, the event was a promising one. It was good to be in a space where so many people cared about Canada, about innovation, and about post-secondary education. And the event itself – very well pulled-off by RBC and BHER – made people want to keep discussing higher education and the economy. Both business and higher education need to have events like this one, regularly, and not just nationally but locally as well. The two sides don’t know each other especially well, and yet their being more in sync is one of the things that could make the country work a lot better than it does. Let’s keep talking.

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