We need a long-term plan for the post-secondary sector in Canada

For decades, Canada’s universities and colleges have been adrift. There have been reports and targeted programs, but no long-term plan to sustain a complex sector that generates research, supports federal policies from immigration to economic development, and helps educate about half of adults in Canada aged 25 to 64. Comparing federal support for post-secondary institutions across countries, even just the G7, is complicated by variations in education systems and governance, including endowment revenues in the U.S. and significant public funding in the European Union. COVID-19 has made comparisons more difficult: pandemic-related federal programs address different aspects of the higher-education sector and on different timelines. For instance, significant stimulus spending promises to boost the sector across the EU, including three G7 countries. They already have a major structural advantage: Times Higher Education noted that “core university budgets have held stable” in the EU during COVID-19 because they are not especially reliant on enrolment revenues. In Japan, the government announced a new “University Fund” of US$96-billion. Heavily dependent on tuition fees, the United Kingdom and the United States are more like Canada. Among U.K. measures is Sustaining University Research Expertise, with funding to offset universities’ “income losses from international students.” The U.S. has the Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund (HEERF), which has distributed US$74.7-billion—US$30.07-billion for students and almost all of the rest for institutions. The Canada Emergency Student Benefit is roughly comparable to HEERF support for students. Canada has followed other countries in directing research funding to the areas most obviously relevant to COVID-19. Temporary research funding includes the Canada Research Continuity Emergency Fund. But little has been done to address institutions’ pandemic losses and costs, as HEERF in particular is designed to do. In February 2021, Laurentian University, partly due to the pandemic, declared insolvency over a sum that, in the U.S., could have been significantly erased by HEERF. We have only learned that Canadian governments don’t consider key public institutions too big to fail. It isn’t just COVID-19 that led us here. Changes in the federal social transfer in the 1990s shifted the ground beneath the sector’s feet. Institutions tried to regain their fiscal balance with higher enrolments and tuition fees. They reduced academic costs by relying more on underpaid part-time faculty. They sought more international enrolments, with even higher tuition fees, too often treating international students on terms that are counter-productive for immigration, internationalization, and other objectives, as many have noted. Students, domestic and international, are now major funders of the sector. The Fundamental Science Review suggested in 2017, “One could reasonably argue that students through their increased tuition fees are being asked to subsidize federal research grants.” Since 2015, according to Statistics Canada, tuition revenues have exceeded total academic salaries. Those salaries pay, in part, for the research time essential to teaching and advancing knowledge at this level, and will be needed for the increased research investment spurred by the far-reaching effects of the pandemic. After a year of reduced tuition, residence, and related revenues, how are institutions to support pandemic recovery? Clearly additional mental health services are urgently needed. Also urgent are additional academic supports for students whose learning has been affected by the pandemic, as we argued in the Royal Society of Canada’s policy briefing on Higher Education and as the RSC policy briefing on Children and Schools has recently reinforced. Student-directed funding through grant and loan programs has been the focus in Canadian federal politics for years. Such programs are clearly necessary to maintain access to higher education and mitigate rising student debt. But such programs will not pay for campus mental health services or educational supports, nor will they sustain, let alone grow, the sector’s research activities. So around we go. Government policy focuses on increasing students’ ability to pay tuition fees without addressing institutions’ funding shortfalls, so institutions increase tuition fees, so governments spend more to maintain students’ ability to pay. And so the sector becomes more vulnerable to fluctuations in enrolments. The Fundamental Science Review examined a number of indicators suggesting that Canada was falling behind its comparators. Significant new pandemic-related investment for post-secondary institutions in other countries is likely to widen that gap. Drifting is no longer an option. We need a plan. Julia M. Wright, FRSC, is George Munro Chair in Literature and Rhetoric at Dalhousie University. She has published widely on university issues, and was chair for the Royal Society of Canada’s policy briefing, Investing in a Better Future: Higher Education and Post-COVID Canada. The Hill Times

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We need a long-term plan for the post-secondary sector in Canada

It isn’t just COVID-19 that led us here. Changes in the federal social transfer in the 1990s shifted the ground beneath the sector’s feet.

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