The Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO), an agency of the Government, released a report in October on the question of how Ontario universities can remain "sustainable" and still ensure high quality education. It's crap.
First of all, no one has demonstrated unequivocally that Ontario universities are sustainable now, or that the quality of the education they offer is high. Flawed assumptions make for nonsense arguments.
Secondly, the recommendation of the report - that "universities should set measureable goals based on their strengths, and the provincial government should base new funding on whether those goals are met" - is just plain wrong.
Consider: if the economy were firing on all cylinders, if the government had a good surplus, if we were flush wish cash - no one would be worried about the universities; they'd have all the funding they needed. The only reason that this foolish report is getting any traction is that (a) we're in rough shape economically at the moment, and (b) the politicians in charge of this crap are only interested in stroking the voting public rather than doing what's right for education.
What this recommendation is trying to do is make universities more efficient. But making a system more efficient necessarily makes it more brittle too. We saw this in the American banking system: it was wildly efficient at generating money, but one mistake and KABOOM! The whole thing fell apart. To make something efficient necessarily means tuning it to only certain circumstances. The more that the circumstances change, the less likely it is that the system can adapt. Push too hard and it'll break like glass - brittle.
Following this recommendation will make the Ontario universities more brittle. That means that eventually, the whole system will collapse. Therefore, the HEQCO recommendation blows, big time.
Here's another problem: the recommendation requires universities to be able to predict the future. To "set targets" means understanding what a future situation will be, well enough to decide how you want your organization to fit into that situation. That's called predicting the future. And we suck at that. We can't even predict the weather more than a few days out. How are we supposed to predict how each university will do years in the future? The recommendation cannot be successfully implemented, therefore the recommendation sucks most spectacularly.
And here's yet another problem: the whole targets thing sets up a competitive environment between universities, which is both counter-productive and just plain wrong. Implementing the report's recommendation will just continue to drive a wedge between the universities. This will lead to less cooperation and collaboration. And that runs counter to the very spirit of university.
So, the HEQCO's report is basically a big steaming pile of fetid horse shit.
If we want to revise how things are done, let's do it right. It's easy.
The key is to recognize that the only entity to which a university should be compared is itself.
First step: determine for each university a "cost factor" that takes into account local costs (e.g. land costs more in downtown Toronto than up in Sudbury, through no fault of universities located in/near these cities - the cost factor would account for all these differences). All information on this cost factor and how it is calculated for each university must be made freely and publicly available.
Second, let each university develop its own rubric by which it will assess its own performance and track its own progress. The rubric and all data collected in implementing the rubric must be made freely and publicly available.
Third, examine how each university performed with respect to its own historical performance. Develop a relative weight for each university that takes into account how well it performed with respect to its own history, and in context of the performance increases (or decreases) at all the other universities. There are a number of methods for doing this. Any of them will do. This will result in another factor - let's call it a performance factor. All this information must also be made freely and publicly available.
Finally, divide up the total university education budget among the universities, using the cost factor and the performance factor to determine proportional increases or decreases to each university's budget. And, yes, all the math to do this must be made freely and publicly available.
Problem solved.
Politicians might not like this method - cuz it's open, transparent, and fair. I really couldn't care less what they think. I'm not even sure they do think.
Recent Comments