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Backwards and Forwards
December 21 , 2007
Alex Usher, Vice President, Educational Policy Institute
This is my last Week in Review for 2007, so I thought I would take the opportunity to look back on the year past and look forward a little to 2008.
I have a feeling that in retrospect 2007 will be seen as an extremely significant year in the history of post-secondary education simply because it was the year that experts around the world finally started taking a good hard look at the nature of quality measurement. In the US, the post-Spellings debate about institutional quality and transparency has moved beyond the US News sucks – no it doesn’t – yes it does stage and has moved on to a much more serious examination of how to sensibly measure performance and permit comparisons. New systems of institutional rankings have appeared in over a dozen countries around the world this year, and nowhere have new initiatives in this area been thicker on the ground than in Latin America. From a region that has traditionally been resistant to higher education reform measures, this kind of activity is extremely significant and perhaps suggests that the massive change in assessment culture in these countries at the secondary level may have arrived at the post-secondary level as well.
In Canada, movement on quality measurement has been slight but there has been at least the beginning of a change in views about the collection and use of data in measuring outcomes in PSE. Provincial governments are waking up to the vast amounts of data they have stored in various administrative databases and are considering how to maximise their potential for program improvement purposes. And the fruits of many years of Statistics Canada data work are becoming available as the most excellent Youth in Transition Survey continues to work its magic. With the fourth survey wave now out, a host of new research possibilities will be opening up, and you can be sure that EPI, in conjunction with its many partners on the MESA project (Measuring the Effectiveness of Student Aid), will be taking an active role in this.
Looking forward to 2008, I think it’s fair to state that higher education policy at the federal level in the United States will be in near-stasis pending the results of the Presidential election in November. We may, however, see some interesting initiatives at the state level, particularly in New York, where Governor Spitzer will be under pressure to move on some of the recommendations made recently by the State’s Commission on Higher Education.
In Canada, on the other hand, things will be much livelier. The results of both a year-long review of the Canada Student Loans Program and the announcement of the renewal or replacement of the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation are both due in the February budget. Oddly, despite the fact that this will be the biggest PSE issue of the year, a lot of people (notably the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada) are trying desperately to shirk the issue as a lobbying priority.
(As an aside – did anyone actually notice HRSD doing much consulting during its program review? I thought it made for an interesting contrast: HRSD conducted its review in near-total secrecy while the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation conducted its mid-term review in 2004 through a series of two dozen public hearings across the country involving all sorts of stakeholder groups. Yet the Foundation is the one always said to be terribly unaccountable due to its legal structure. True in theory, of course, but in practice there’s a significant gap in the way the two organizations treat their clients, and it`s not obvious on that basis that the “public” organization is actually more accountable than the “private” one.)
Personally, I think that the chances of the Foundation being renewed are growing by the day simply because the Government of Canada has a fiscal surplus for this year which can only be described as gi-normous and “Canada’s New Government” doesn’t seem any more reluctant than its previous one to dispose of surpluses via the Foundation route. Even if it doesn’t go that way, HRSD has a well-developed set of plans to spend $350 Million a year on a variety of grants and subsidies of varying degrees of sensibleness. However, these draft plans suffer from two significant disadvantages: they are complicated and they foist a lot of new costs onto provinces. Should the Foundation not be renewed there will be a lot of provincial complaining and more besides – my bet is that at least one province may pull out of the CSLP and establish its own Quebec-like system should the draft HRSD plans come to fruition.
Institutional funding will continue to grow in importance as an issue across the developed world. As growth tails off in the face of stock- and bond-market problems, institutions may find it hard to keep reaping the major gains of the last couple of years (which in some parts of Canada have been double-digit in nature). Moreover, as the demographic crunch begins to bite, increasing demands on other parts of the state budget – notably health care – will make it harder and harder for governments to spend what they ideally should on higher education.
Yet the demand for high-cost education will continue to grow: although we are only really beginning to come to grips conceptually with a truly global market for higher education, in practice this market is developing rapidly all the time, and to enter this competition takes money – a lot of it. I believe that developments in this area will probably be the most exciting and far-reaching of all in the next year or so.
All of this inevitably means pressure on tuition fees. Germany is the most obvious possible flash point on this issue, but no doubt there will be low-level skirmishing issue in the US as Presidential candidates compete to offer dubiously-constructed subsidies to the middle class in the run-up to November.
In short, next year boils down to: how can institutions get more money, and how can we measure what they do with it? We at EPI look forward to participating in these debates and enriching them with our mix of research, publications, and commentary.
Enjoy the holidays.
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