Back to the Future with Differentiation?
BHER had their AGM last week. I was not in attendance (nor invited! haha), but John Stackhouse from RBC published some of his key takeaways from the event on Friday. He frames these takeaways as arising from a discussion of the obdurate nature of post-secondary organizations, and strategies that we can enact to change that.
Some context: BHER is a unique org where leaders from across industry and post-secondary education have joined forces with a view towards “achieving the best outcomes for Canada as a whole.” This type of inter-sectoral discussion – IMHO – is sorely needed, but that’s a different conversation.
Anyway, this week I am going to nitpick at some of the ideas John has highlighted as emerging from those discussions. This exercise is born not out of disagreement, but rather, from an interest in identifying some of the challenges/benefits associated with some of the recommendations.
Today I’ll start with differentiation. John notes that Canadian PSE could benefit from “more differentiation”, and in particular, “more private universities.” ??
It is important to note that differentiation as a policy strategy is far from novel. At least in Ontario, the provincial government embraced differentiation more than a decade ago. And, we saw a lot of discussion of its potential benefits in various academic books (e.g., Fallis, 2014) and policy reports (e.g., Weingarten & Fiona Deller, PhD , 2010).
But, and as colleagues and I predicted in an article nearly a decade ago, this push for differentiation ended up being a largely failed experiment.
I see no evidence that our PSE system is any more differentiated today than it was prior to the most recent push for differentiation. The reasons for this outcome are multiple, and I don’t want to regurgitate what’s already been published. In brief: PSE organizations are quite stubborn in pursuing forms dictated by norms in their field, and they are quite adept at “decoupling” or feigning compliance with external government dictates.
If you could somehow overcome our historical failures on this front, I agree that a more differentiated PSE system could better respond to societal needs. However, your next challenge becomes identifying those needs and engineering the types of differentiation required to meet them. Keep in mind that the former are dynamic, and the latter will always lag considerably.
In other words: good luck nudging PSE organizations to expediently differentiate in undesired directions! (e.g., ask a university to let go of research or particular disciplines)
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Shifting our attention to the types of differentiation cited by John… I agree that fostering a more robust private sector would greatly improve differentiation in our PSE system. Private career colleges already play an important role in meeting demand for programing at the college level that is left unmet by the public counterparts. There isn’t currently much of an equivalent on the university side in Ontario, at least.
An important question: what kind of private university sector do we want to enable? Do we want agile for-profits that can quickly respond to market demand for specific forms of training (e.g., Devry)? Or, do we want to lure more elite non-profits north of the border?
Bases on John’s comments, and the highlighting of “more elite programs”, it appears that there is appetite for the latter – particularly at the Ph.D. level.
I have so many thoughts about this course of action.
I don’t know what the returns are here to having more elite non-profits setting up shop in Toronto, Vancouver, etc., unless we think this has the potential to spur existing players to innovate in the face of heightened competition. Moreover, given that i) Ph.D. programs are uniformly designed to prepare students for faculty jobs, ii) more than half of students have historically pursued them for that purpose, and iii) fewer than 1-in-5 achieve that outcome, we need tread carefully if we are going to expand supply.
***Note: My reference here is Brittany Etmanski, PhD , David Walters , & David Zarifa, 2017
I’m all for loosening restrictions that allow the private sector to respond to unmet market demand, particularly when it is done at no cost to the taxpayer. But, we should give much more thought as to the architecture of the system we desire.
Based on a reading of John’s takeaways, it seems that there is a lot of creative energy focused on what the future could look like. I am fully onboard for this type of exercise, and for decisive action on the part of key players to improve our system. At the same time, I worry when we sprint to identify solutions for the future without an appreciation of the past.
I'll be back with more thoughts on this later in the week...