In a post on the website of Higher Education Strategy Associates, an education consulting firm, its president, Alex Usher, makes the case that Canada is “eating the future” by focusing on consumption rather than investment.
He contrasts spending on the elderly with money spent on post-secondary education. The former has seen exponential growth that is expected to continue, while the latter has been stagnant. And the gap is growing: 15 years ago, according to Usher, Canada was spending 4.5 times more on the elderly than on post-secondary education; today, it is six times more.
Universities worry about this trend, and so too should governments and the general public. Canada needs a post-secondary teaching and research capacity that is competitive with the best in the world, and it needs investment that will secure and sustain it.
The insufficiency of current investment is showing in operating and capital budgets, deferred maintenance and in global rankings. We still have a few of the best universities in the world, but less than a handful of them even rank among the top 100 in the world, according to the 2024 Academic Ranking of World Universities.
Why are our universities struggling to pay their bills and to keep up with their peers in other countries? The most immediate answer is that they are being squeezed from both ends: stagnant or declining public investment for which they cannot compensate by charging the necessary fees to meet their institutional needs.
The problem has persisted for years, and is well known, but governments continue holding domestic tuition fees in check and, recently, capping the number of international students for whom higher fees can be charged. In doing so, they are responding to pressure from students and student unions to keep tuition increases low, and from communities facing the collateral costs of growing numbers of international students.
The old saying that “you can’t have it both ways” applies here. The status quo is not sustainable. Universities must be free to secure more from tuition if governments are unable, or unwilling, to support them with enough funding to meet their needs.
Difficult questions for governments and universities lie beneath this problem. Canadian governments are good at writing cheques that bring early gratification to voters; they are not good at identifying medium- and longer-term investments that will improve future prospects for the country.
Why, we must ask, have they tolerated a system that has proved unsustainable for our universities for so long? Short-sightedness is part of the answer; insufficient pressure to do otherwise is another.
But universities also have much to answer for. Why have they not been more successful in gaining public support? Why have they been unable to escape the straitjackets in which they have been put? Their individual and collective actions have been unsuccessful at securing more public funding or raising public concern to a level that would prompt governments to act.
Our universities have not made the partnerships — among themselves and with other private- and public-sector organizations — that should have raised more united and concerted voices in their favour. And there are growing concerns that they are straying from their missions in order to follow political and social justice ends.
What should be their institutional neutrality is giving way to the pursuit of causes. Some Canadians are sympathetic to their causes, others are not. The result is a fractured public consensus in place of the type of wide, non-partisan support that could transcend political differences.
Canadians need organized, non-ideological and focused attention on these issues, and they need answers that will give them confidence that a change of direction will follow.
National Post
Peter MacKinnon has served as president of three Canadian universities and is a senior fellow of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.