Ontario Budget: "A whole new University of Guelph!" What about the existing one?

You'll forgive me if I'm not branding Dalton McGuinty the "Post-secondary Education Premier" after today's throne speech. Lt-Governor David Onley's throne speech made reference to a commitment to increase university and college spaces by 20,000 this year, likening this to "a whole new University of Guelph".

Meanwhile, the actual University of Guelph, where I work, is suffering from the last few years of Ontario budget cuts, which failed to deliver on promised inflation-matching funding increases, and turned off the taps on graduate funding, after encouraging the university (and others province-wide) to hire new faculty. What we're faced with now is a non-existent budget for sessional instructors, curtailed funding for graduate students, growing undergraduate class sizes, and faculty retirements that there is no budget to replace.

Here's an idea, Dalton: how about restoring core operating funding to Ontario's colleges and universities so that they can deliver quality education to the existing student base, rather than pumping more undergraduates into overcrowded classrooms?

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Knowledge economy? What knowledge economy? Ontario budget edition

Maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised in the next few days when someone points out the super-secret pot of money for post-secondary education that is part of Dalton McGuinty's spend-a-thon budget. But as of right now, I don't see it, and it's not showing up in any of the media coverage I have seen so far. There's a bit of money for infrastructure, which would be great if only we could afford faculty (or even part-timers) to teach in these buildings.

Recessions are usually periods where university enrollment goes up, as people try to upgrade their skills, or generally wait out a bad job market. So we're likely going to see more students in our universities for the next few years. Those students will be entering a post-secondary system where endowments have been slammed by the stock market's decline, and thus resources are tight for scholarships, bursaries, and in some cases, basic teaching resources. They will enter larger classes, because there is no funding to hire new faculty, and even the resources to hire sessional instructors are tight. It would have demonstrated some foresight had McGuinty and Duncan thought to compensate for the anticipated crunch in the post-secondary sector. But I've come not to expect that from him. It's a particularly bitter pill to swallow when my own MP, Liz Sandals, is the Minister for Colleges and Universities. Apparently, she doesn't have much pull at the Cabinet table.

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Recessions and universities

During recessions, more people tend to enroll in universities, both to improve their credentials and to wait out the tough economic times in a (hopefully) stimulating environment. At most universities across Ontario (with the notable exception of York), first year applications are up - by about 6% in the case of my institution, the University of Guelph.

This week, York University's contract faculty and teaching assistants were legislated back to work. The University of Toronto's contract faculty have struck a tentative deal on Thursday. While I did not agree with all of the York union's demands, both they and the university's president pointed to one crucial issue which is being overlooked. University funding is stagnating, as enrollment continues to rise. Promised increases in university funding, which were supposed to keep pace with inflation, have been halted by Dalton McGuinty's government. This is particularly troublesome when you consider that this is the same government that encouraged Ontario's universities to hire more faculty in order to grow their graduate programs. They did, and now the promised funding isn't coming through.

At the same time, the federal government, which also contributes to university funding (especially through scholarships and research funds) is also causing headaches. While the spend-o-rama federal budget included funds for capital improvement, it cut back on funding to the major research granting councils, and scrapped funding to the Genome project.

What does all of this mean? Well, unless one level of government or the other decides to think about the long-term implications of their decisions, it means that universities will be filled with more and more students, who are increasingly taught in nice buildings with massive lecture halls to accommodate huge class sizes. They will be increasingly taught by part-time faculty who don't have time to do research because their teaching load is so high. The lucky faculty who do land tenure-track jobs will also find themselves with larger class sizes, and fewer teaching assistants to help them grade and run tutorial groups. And they will be competing for an ever-shrinking pool of research funding - assuming that they have time to squeeze in a bit of research in between grading for the hundreds of students they teach each term.

I'm not optimistic that the next provincial budget will include increased university funding. Although more and more Ontarians are sending their children to university and college, post-secondary education is the poor cousin of the provincial budget, falling far behind health and primary/secondary education. Because its benefits are long-term, it probably won't be seen as a priority area for a "stimulus package", and it's not going to be perceived as a vote-getter. This is unfortunate, because the huge cohort of students flooding our universities will not be receiving the best education that they could.

Perhaps I'll be surprised, and Dalton McGuinty will show some long-term vision, and use the recession to improve how institutions are funded, with a view to the future. But judging by past experience at the provincial level, and the fingers-in-the-dyke approach to crisis management being demonstrated in Ottawa, I'm sadly not optimistic.

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Dion, Post-secondary Education Funding and Liberal prospects

The blogosphere is predictably abuzz today with discussion of the Liberal party's platform. For personal reasons, I'm quite fond of the promise to increase funding to each of the government's three research granting councils - including the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, which funds my research - by 34%.

However, what struck me while reading all of the punditry about the affordability of the platform, including whether or not it was a valid strategy to use the Conservatives' economic forecasts, is that this is the first time that I've voted in a federal election when I didn't really think that those discussions mattered in the long run. I write this not out of some deep-seated skepticism about election promises (although that would also be a fair assessment), but because I have no illusions that the Liberals will get a chance to fully implement this platform. The best that I'm hoping for is that they will help hold the Conservatives to a minority government. I would bet good money that the very best most Liberal insiders are hoping for is a minority of their own - albeit with the ensuing post-election compromises that would negate their ability to fulfill many promises.

I find the whole situation rather depressing. I'm pretty certain that I won't be voting Liberal in this election, but I find myself hoping that enough other Canadians will do so to stop a Conservative majority. The problem is that I have trouble figuring out why these "hypothetical Canadians" - the "Zoe"s of the Conservative playbook - would be convinced to do so on the basis of the Liberals' TV ads and general campaign strategy. So far, the Liberal ads look like they were made by a first year communication student's class project - even the NDP's ones are slicker! Yet if the voters of Canada are convinced, it probably won't be on the basis of the "Green Shift" and the positive aspects of the Liberal platform, but out of fear of a Harper majority. I don't think that the party is in for a massacre along the lines of the 1993 election, but it must be sobering for party members to think that a Liberal majority is completely out of the cards.

So yes, some of the elements of the Liberal platform are what I think of as good policies for Canada - but I also think that the mood of the country and its assessment of the Liberals to date is such that this amounts to some nice, hopeful, creative writing.

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Post-secondary Education - Demographic Challenges

According to this morning's Globe and Mail, the three Toronto universities - U of T, York and Ryerson - are expecting their admission demands to continue to rise over the next two decades. This is a sharp contrast to virtually every other region of the country, where enrollments are expected to either plateau or drop. According to the article's author, this demand is being driven largely by immigration trends to the city.

The manner in which this article is couched seems to imply that this situation entails a crisis for the three universities and that an appropriate response would be to further both inncrease admissions at these institutions and expand their campuses. I'm not convinced that this is necessarily the route to go, and am worried about the sustainability of this option.

Part of my thinking about this issue reflects the fact that I'm not convinced that students should have to attend university in the city they grew up in. Indeed, there is a lot to be said for attending a university which has program offerings that better meet an individual's needs - and a fair bit to be said for getting out of the family home and striking out on one's own. Moreover, there is also the question of what dropping enrollments at other universities means for the future of those institutions. Throughout the Maritimes, for example, universities are already unable to meet their enrollment targets. Eventually, this may mean shrinking faculties and a decline in the quality of education available at these (and other) institutions. A better approach might be to look seriously at student loan/scholarship programs to allow students to attend universities in other cities.

I also look at this from the perspective of students already at the Toronto institutions. I did my undergrad at U of T in the 1990s, and it was already too large for the comfort of most students. Class sizes are out of control in first and second year courses, and I worry what even larger student body numbers would mean for the experience of the students (and the faculty, for that matter). At a certain point, the quality of education at these institutions is likely to suffer from over-expansion.

Two other points come to mind. The first is that there are numerous universities (McMaster, Guelph, Brock, Laurier, Waterloo, Western, Trent, Queen's) within a 2-3 hour drive from Toronto, which could accommodate some of this projected demand, and are close enough for weekend trips for those students reluctant to move too far from home.

Finally, did I read correctly that there are plans for another university in Sault Ste. Marie? This strikes me as a spectacularly bad idea. The northern Ontario universities already have terrible problems with faculty recruitment and retention, and I doubt this institution will fare any better. Again, I think it would be better to make it easier for northern students to afford residence fees than to build yet more new institutions which are local, yet lack the amenities and faculty calibre of their southern equivalents.

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