Ontario Finance Minister Dwight Duncan offered no more insight into the government’s plans for post-secondary education than could be found in Budget 2011 or Tuesday’s Speech from the Throne. The commitment to 60,000 more student places by fall 2015 was repeated. Although the Throne Speech alluded to the tuition rebate promised during the election campaign, no mention was made in this Fall Economic Statement.

It is not clear where funding for post-secondary education is headed. No updated figures for specific program spending were offered for 2012-13 and 2013-14. Duncan did reiterate the government’s commitment to “protect health care and education as the most important public services.” He also signaled that, when he tables budget 2012, growth in overall program spending may be reduced from 1.4 to 1.0 per cent a year over the upcoming five years or more. What that might mean for annual increases in support for health care and education (expected to increase at three and one per cent respectively), and whether “education” includes post-secondary education, is not yet known.

In the meantime, if the Liberal government delivers on its promise to provide $309 million in additional operating funding to support college and university enrolment growth by 2013-14, per student funding may remain stable. But it will continue to drop in real terms. If funding increases after that are limited to one per cent or less, per student funding will drop even further. In the past, the shortfall has been made up through tuition increases. The current policy permits an average annual tuition increase of five per cent. It is set to be replaced or renewed next year – at the same time Ontario Budget 2012 will tell us the direction the Liberal government is going on operating funding for colleges and universities.

Among Ontario’s thousands of professors and academic librarians, there are scholars who specialize in irony.

We are grateful for their expertise; at times like these, their guidance is sorely needed. For it is certainly a sublime irony that, after decades of sounding the alarm bell over declining quality at our universities, university faculty are now being singled out as the cause of this decline.

A small coterie of columnists and pundits are convinced that professors are to blame for a disappointing undergraduate experience. They claim we spend too little time teaching. We focus too much on research, they say. As a result, class sizes are getting bigger, universities are turning to part-time faculty to teach, and students can’t engage with their instructors.

The critics are right about the consequences, but wrong about the cause. We need to get serious about the reasons why quality is threatened at our universities. Like most things, it comes down to money. The amount of per-student funding provided to universities by the government of Ontario has declined by 25 per cent since 1990, adjusted for inflation. Since 2001, enrolment has increased by 60 per cent. Think about what that means: universities are trying to accommodate significantly more students while receiving significantly less funding for each of those students. It doesn’t take a mathematician to realize this is a bad equation for the quality of higher education in Ontario.

The decline in per-student funding has had a variety of negative effects. Universities have simply been unable to hire enough full-time professors to meet the rise in student demand. Our student-to-faculty ratio is now 27-to-1, the worst in Canada. In 1990, it was 18-to-1. So let’s be clear: the problem is not that faculty are not teaching enough. It’s that they cannot possibly teach enough to compensate for the acute shortage of faculty in the university system. We simply need more professors.

True, research does take up a lot of time for most full-time faculty in the university system. But this is a matter of survival. Ontario’s underfunded universities have become exceptionally good at chasing dollars. It just so happens that a lot of new dollars — particularly those from the federal government — are for research. The government of Ontario has also emphasized research and commercialization through their funding policies. No surprise then that the entire reward and career advancement structure at our universities has become research focused. Many professors would like to spend more time teaching, but find the current system filled with too many disincentives.

To address this problem, critics offer the bromide of “teaching-only” professors or “teaching only” institutions. This, they claim, will allow us to teach more students without making additional public investments. Giving faculty the option to focus on teaching is not necessarily a bad idea. But let’s be clear: teaching-focused professors should not be seen as a way to deliver university education on the cheap. To be successful, our universities must always be adequately funded. And we have to recognize that scholarship is an important part of being a professor, and an important part of a university education.

Scholarship — which I define as the creation of new knowledge, the critical analysis of existing knowledge, and the communication of these insights — is central to the university. The teaching and scholarship equation is not zero-sum. Teaching is scholarship, and the two are inextricably linked. The critics will point to research that says being a good researcher does not make you a good teacher. This misses the point. You simply cannot have university-level teaching without the kind of intellectual inquiry that scholars are trained to do. If you remove scholarship from the professoriate or from our universities, you are no longer giving students the education they expect.

The critics of Ontario’s professors and academic librarians need to get real about what ails our university system. Right now, they’re only advocating for a system that offers more teaching. Meanwhile, faculty are talking about what they have always been talking about: a system that does more and better teaching. Surely our students deserve nothing less.

Constance Adamson is president of the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations.

From 1975 to 2005, the cost of attending public universities in the U.S. tripled. Benjamin Ginsberg argues that much of the increased cost can be attributed to administrative bloat.

Since the 1970s, Ginsberg notes, the number of administrative staffers has risen  by 235 percent, while the number of faculty and students has increased by only about 50 percent.

Some administrators do so little that they “could be kidnapped by space aliens and it would be weeks or even months before his or her absence from campus was noticed,” Ginsberg writes.

He also says the increase in administrators is taking universities away from their fundamental academic purpose, and doing students a disservice.

Continues at this link to NPR Boston  http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2011/11/02/university-cost-bloated

The total research income of ­Canada’s top 50 universities was $6.5 billion in 2010, up 3.6% from the previous year. Thirty-three universities had increases in research income, while 17 saw a decline.

UNIVERSITY RESEARCH

No. 1: U. of Toronto, $878M

No. 4: U. of Alberta, $513M

No. 5: McGill U., $469M

No. 8: U. of Calgary, $469M

RESEARCH TOP 10

Top 10 universities ranked by sponsored research income

University of Toronto
$878 million

University of British Columbia
$538 million

Universite de Montreal
$543 million

University of Alberta
$513 million

McGill University
$469 million

McMaster University
$395 million

Universite Laval
$307 million

University of Calgary
$282 million

University of Ottawa
$273 million

University of Western Ontario
$221 million

Source: Research Infosource Inc.

October 24, 2011

It’s Time to Move Beyond Rankings 

In a guest post, Ellen Hazelkorn calls for a public campaign to make governments aware of the dangers of using university rankings as a basis for policy making.

Statistics Canada data show that between 2007 and 2010 direct federal funding for business R&D rose by 16 per cent after inflation, while, in contrast, federal R&D funding for higher education rose by a mere two per cent. As a percentage of Canada’s GDP, federal support for business R&D and its support for higher education R&D are headed in opposite directions.

This pattern does not bode well for federal funding of basic research at universities, where in fact the bulk of basic research occurs. Even though the Expert Panel estimates that 15 per cent of direct federal funding for business R&D (excluding “commercialization”) was for basic research, that figure includes funding that goes to universities for business-centered research.

Sources: Review of Federal Support to Research and Development, Expert Panel, Innovation Canada: A Call to Action – Expert Panel Report; Statistics Canada: Industrial Research and Development: Intentions 2010; Federal Scientific Activities 2011/2012.

Glen Murray, MPP for Toronto Centre and former Minister of Research and Innovation, has been appointed Minister of Training, Colleges, and Universities for the Government of Ontario.

Murray, who served as mayor of Winnipeg, was a member of the Toronto Gay Patrol in 1983, was the co-chair of Canadians for Equal Marriage, and chair of the Big City Mayors Caucus. He won the Queen’s Jubilee Medal and the 2003 “Fight for LGBT Justice and Equality” award from Égale Canada. For his work with the aboriginal community he was given the highest honour, an Eagle Feather.

Murray was appointed president and CEO of the Canadian Urban Institute in 2007. He has served on several university, hospital, and community boards and was appointed by Prime Minister Paul Martin to chair the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, where he helped to shape environmental policy in Canada.

OCUFA congratulates Murray on his appointment and looks forward to working with him to protect and enhance the quality of university education in Ontario.