One of the challenges I find in doing comparative higher education work is that because everyone in the field went to university, they think they know what a university is.  But the fact is universities around the world are different: they are run on different logics; they aspire to do different things and hence can have differing operational processes.  Making useful comparisons, or trying to infer motives for institutional actions in other countries, can be very difficult.

One of the most fascinating examples of this is right here in North America: Canada and the United States.  Because at one level they are almost identical, and at another they are very, very different.  So today and tomorrow I want to compare and contrast higher education in the two countries.  Today: the similarities, and tomorrow, the differences.

The first and maybe most important thing is that they share similar institutional origin and structure DNA. In both countries, higher education started out as civic-religious enterprises – that is, the creation of local notables seeking to solve the problem of keeping local schools and ministries supplied with qualified labour.  Because of religious pluralism, this was quite unlike the origin story of European universities, where the churches who sponsored universities were generally local monopolies.  Our institutions were literally in the business of competing for souls from the get-go, and this created a sense that institutions are not, by nature, designed to co-operate with one another.  (In the US and Quebec, they eventually got around that problem by creating state systems, but we’ll leave that one for tomorrow).

The degree structure is the same across both countries, and – barring a period over a century ago when doctorates were in use in the US but not Canada – they always have been.  We have four-year undergraduate degrees, followed by 1-2 year Master’s degrees, followed by doctoral degrees that are among the longest in the world.  The undergraduate degrees are also both structured in more or less the same way, via “credits” which, at least to some degree, are transmissible internally from one program to another and from one institution to or another.  The amazing outcome of this is that there is no need for any complicated international agreements around degree-recognition between the two countries.  Canadians accept a Master’s degree in New Mexico the way they accept one from Saskatchewan and vice-versa.  It sounds trivial to us, but this same achievement took Europe a decade to achieve through its Bologna Process.

Another commonality is academic ranks and the structure of academic profession.  The structure of assistant/associate/full professor is identical.  Progression through those ranks is more or less identical.  The nature of tenure associated with these ranks is more or less identical.  The expectation that research is part and parcel of the process is more or less identical (it varies according to the research-intensiveness of the institution).  And the way that academics use sessional lecturers to plug the gaps left behind by the drive of full-time academics to produce research – that’s common, too.

Academic governance, on the whole, looks pretty similar.  Typically, governance is bicameral, with one body (it goes by different names, though the predominant one is “Senate”) in charge of “academic affairs.” This body shares governance responsibility with a body responsible for finance, drawn substantially from the external community (usually called a Board, though the way it is chosen varies enormously).  The point here is that it is understood that financial decisions are fundamentally something which is outside the grip both of Senate and of the government of the day and instead in the hands of some group of external worthies who have (at least in the case of public institutions) the confidence of government but also have fiduciary duties to the institution itself.  This is not without its tensions, and these tensions play out differently across both countries, depending on the varying role that governments play in the appointment of these bodies.

This one might sound like a bit of a cop-out, but the federal nature of post-secondary education is also a key commonality.  In neither country does the national government decisively shape higher education, and as a result there is a fair bit of diversity of funding systems in both countries.  This makes generalizations around funding challenging.

That said, though, the system of mixed-funding – some from government, some from students and some from various other forms of self-generated income – is broadly similar.  The proportions that come from each areas vary significantly both within and across countries.  But on the whole, even if one excludes the private sector in the US, government revenues are a more important part of institutional revenues in Canada than the US, the fact is that institutions in both countries are juggling different forms of revenue generation and the different accountabilities that each source generates.

That’s a lot of similarities: enough to make what I have previously called a common higher education area.  But there are also a lot of differences.  More on them tomorrow.