Tag: Interesting

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.