CANADA: Conference looks at 'Stepford universities'

"Everyone wants to look like Harvard," said Ian Clark, explaining a fundamental weakness in the Canadian university model. He and seven other higher education pundits will explore this and other themes - including mission, incentives and image - at a "Stepford Universities? Differentiation in the new higher education landscape" conference in Toronto next week.

The conference, which runs from 28-29 September, will pay special attention to the international phenomenon of isomorphism in the post-secondary sector.

That's where, in response to decreased government support, institutions have come to assume characteristics that - while superficially different - make them fundamentally the same as they compete for a smaller and smaller slice of the funding pie.

The situation is complicated by an absence of government-enforced policy frameworks to regulate incentives to higher education, said Clark, a professor at the University of Toronto's School of Public Policy and Governance and former president of the Council of Ontario Universities.

This means that on one hand, you have two decades of per-student funding from government for general operations not keeping pace with university costs while, on the other hand, research gets prioritised over teaching in order to attract external funding.

This has caused fragmentation of the higher education sector, where "unbridled competition among academics pursuing the same goals" has resulted in isomorphism rather than differentiation. The lack of institutional differentiation has meant that undergraduate education is being sacrificed at the altar of professorial ambitions, a concern that has elicited recent media attention.

Clark, along with senior governmental and academic colleagues, delved into the consequences of the situation in their 2009 study Academic Transformation: The forces reshaping higher education in Ontario.

In the report, Ontario was used as a case study because it - among all the Canadian provinces - seems to have the least amount of differentiation in its higher education sector. Looking at Canada as a whole, the authors wrote that its teacher-scholar model is not only financially unsustainable but undermines the education available to undergraduate students.

A follow-up monograph, Academic Reform: Policy options for improving the quality and cost-effectiveness of undergraduate education in Ontario, which will be published by McGill-Queen's University Press in early November, considers a new higher education model that focuses on undergraduate teaching achieved through diversifying the sector. The result would be teaching-oriented undergraduate institutions operating alongside traditional research universities.

The best example of such a paradigm is the three-tiered public higher education system in California. There, students can attend one of the 10 campuses and move easily along readily available pathways between the research, teaching and community college streams.

Canada has been slow to adopt a similar differentiated system, and this is especially notable in Ontario, which attracts most of the country's undergraduate students. As a result, "undergraduate education is being offered at institutions that use a research university model for the allocation of professional time between teaching and research," said Clark.

The situation is exacerbated, he added, because "this binary system in Ontario offers inadequate opportunities for movement between the college and university sector".

And, in the context of increased internal costs and reduced funding within the research-intensive university model, "what's gotten squeezed has been the faculty-student ratio."

Clark explained that, as universities rely more and more on part-time and sessional teachers who cannot have the same ongoing and committed relationship to the institution as their full-time faculty colleagues, "students are getting shorter and shorter shrift".

Changing the Ontario system therefore will require action by the provincial government.

While there are some who believe that differentiation can be achieved by simply deregulating tuition, Clark and his Academic Reform co-authors instead support bringing in a funding formula of incentives that, over time, would improve the quality and cost-effectiveness of the system.

Although all higher education systems could use more resources, the current crisis in academia "is ultimately about cost effectiveness - the system needs to produce more undergraduate learning per dollar," said Clark.

More information about the conference can be found at stepforduniversities.com