to Start Your Day

Normally, Nova Scotia universities are funded through a series of Memorandums of Understanding signed every three or four years or so. Objectives are agreed, and the universities get some planning certainty. This year, very suddenly at the start of February, the government signaled it was going to replace these multi-year agreements with a series of one-year agreements, a move which simultaneously deprived the institutions of planning certainty and provided a way for government to yank institutions’ chains more tightly on a continuous basis over the coming years. At a substantive level, the sector-wide settlement the government imposed was this:

• The government agreed to increase funding by 1% (i.e. substantially below inflation).
• The government put a 2% cap on domestic (i.e. Nova Scotia) students. Tuition for out-of-province domestic students is now unregulated.
• The government required institutions to raise international tuition to rise by 9% (except Dal and King’s which as near as I can tell had already done so).
• Operating grants to all institutions except Dalhousie were to rise 2%, subject to reaching an accord with the Ministry on a Strategic Alignment Proposal.
• Operating grants to Dalhousie were frozen, and then subject to a 2% holdback until a Strategic Alignment Proposal is agreed.

(If you’re thinking that Dal’s treatment this is one of those classic Canadian “let’s-cut-down-the-tallest-poppy” things, you are absolutely correct.)

• a plan to reduce “administrative costs” (no definition here, thus inviting all kinds of gaming) by 5% through “inter-university administrative initiatives.” Why exactly these reductions have to come this way rather than simple improved administration institutional level is unclear to me (and a little bit weird).
• a “long-term International Student Sustainability plan,” which seems to require some thinking about housing and impacts on communities (which is the province’s business) but also recruitment, support, and diversification of source countries (which are not even vaguely in the province’s wheelhouse).

On top of that, the government has decided that it is going to create systems of both “performance-based measurement” and “performance-based funding.”  The distinction is critical. It’s not 100% clear what the distinction between these two are, but as near as I can tell, performance measurement will involve reporting on five “common outcomes”:

1. Programs tailored to meet current and future economic and labour market needs
2. Student well-being and mental health are supported
3. Quick and efficient education of students
4. Graduation of students and attachment to the workforce
5. Research and innovation focused on achieving provincial priorities and advancing the public good

The good news is that the province is committed to working out individual performance metrics with each of the institutions with respect to their actual performance. The bad news is: how the hell do you measure performance on measures 1, 2, and 5? 3 and 4 you can measure through relatively simple time-to-completion and post-graduate work outcomes which can already be done through existing systems either at the institutional level, or through graduate monitoring systems run by the Maritime Provinces Higher Education Commission. But the others? It’s not difficult to come up with narratives which describe institutional activities in these areas, but coming up with actual “measurements”? I await developments, but I’m not optimistic.

Meanwhile there is the actual Performance-Based Funding. This seemingly has nothing to do with performance-based measurement, at least formally. What the government is suggesting here is in line with Alberta and Ontario, in the sense that performance-based funding is all stick (withholding of money due to institutions) and no carrot (offering new money as incentives, which is the opposite of the way literally everyone else in the world does it.) But it is very different in the sense that it is not going to withhold funds based on abstract, impersonal indicators, but on super-practical matters like:

• Withholding funds if health programs are not utilized at 97% or higher. The hold on grant funding for non-achievement of this goal will be 10% for Dalhousie and 3% for everyone else (yes, it is that stupid/vindictive)
• Whether the institution has bed spaces for 15% of their FTE enrolment or not (or has plans to meet this level); if not, the government may slap an enrolment cap on the institution. On top of this, Dalhousie and CBU are being hit with 10% holdbacks on grants unless they provide immediate evidence of plans to add 200 or 300 (respectively) student beds.

Well, now. One could say a lot about this: in particular that institutions might have a right to feel victimized that, having been told by government to act entrepreneurially and get money from non-government sources, have now been told “no, not like that” and penalized for success.

The Government of Nova Scotia is really saying that it wants to know that universities are on board with not just its long-term goals about knowledge and economic growth; it wants to know that universities are on board with extremely short-term priorities like having enough health care workers and housing costs. Forget the fact that provincial governments from one coast to the other are making health care shortages worse through a variety of budget decisions or have made housing crises worse over the past decade through terrible zoning decisions and NIMBY-ish inclinations. It’s all hands on deck now. The Government of Nova Scotia is letting it be known that it does not view universities as being separate from the state – that they are essentially utilities, subservient to the state.

I will leave it to others to discuss the implications for institutional autonomy over the long term. The point I would like to underline is something I discussed at a forum I attended in Halifax two weeks ago, with respect to how universities communicate with the public. Specifically, I mused: why is it that universities keep organizing their strategic plans around themes like “teaching” and “research” if what the public and government want to hear are things like “contributions to health care” and “keeping housing costs down”? If universities are public-serving institutions, why do they keep trying to summarize their achievements in terms that the public clearly think are second-tier priorities?

To be clear: I am not saying teaching and research are unimportant. I am saying that institutions seem to have forgotten how to phrase their interests in ways that the public think are relevant and important. They have, in a word, forgotten how to listen to the public. That, coupled with the unbridled hunt for international students in recent years, has seriously harmed many institutions’ social license to operate the way they would like to.

What Nova Scotia is attempting is not something any Canadian government has previously done. It is attempting to re-make the relationship between universities and the state. I have my doubts that it will actually accomplish this efficiently (the province’s Department of Advanced Education is almost certainly too understaffed to be able to simultaneously manage nine different negotiation processes in a sensible way). But I suspect it will not be the only province to try this.

The sector should be prepared. A first step would be to communicate less and listen more.