Note: This post was written in the past, but various currents in public affairs have made me feel that it is important to publish this now. It is neither perfect, nor do I fully stand by it, it is simply a thinkpiece of what it would mean to pivot student union-based post-secondary thinking on how large post-secondary should be.
An elegy is a celebration for what was lost.
There is risk there, in idealizing the past-–ignoring its faults—but without acknowledging the brightest points in the past, we may view temporal distance from them as a marker of progress–of a modernity that is
sensible. For this reason, we should attempt to find things worthy of emulation in the
past. These points then may be not fires from which we flee, but those lighthouses which
can return us safely to desirable ports. So let us to it.
This is an elegy to an empty auditorium.
I. Overview
This decade has been marked by burgeoning classrooms, especially at colleges, at least
in the days where we have had the privilege of studying in them. Outside the classroom,
online education raised the prospect of a far more pervasive post-secondary education,
something seen as desirable even if it was not realized. But beyond an international
surge in post-secondary attendance, universities and colleges have seen a large,
sometime steady, increase in attendance across Canada. As attendance increases, so
too do the full classrooms–mass education bringing together more people. There are
fewer times in the day with the large auditorium empty and more struggle in nabbing an
empty room for a quiet study space. The inefficiencies of classroom scheduling that
permit empty seats invariably shrink as attendance increases.
But this is not an elegy for the physical effects, or a screed about how more students
change the infrastructural experience of our institutions. The empty auditorium is a call
back to a time of less post-secondary education, where a large auditorium might be
needed for the biggest of courses, but where the goal was not packing the institutions
as full as could be. We cannot go back to a world where Canadian post-secondary was a
place for education of the elites, that much is sure. But for student associations, mass
education has an underbelly, a ventral side rarely observed compared to the dorsal side
visible from the rising tide. This document is about rethinking the student association’s
role in a world where decreasing attendance becomes a core goal, and some reasons
why they may at least want to consider it.
This elegy is composed of four main parts, all with a student or student association
perspective. This overview, which looks at advantages and disadvantages of this
massifying of education, a section that looks at tools for reform, a third section that
looks at how those tools can be put into practice, and a fourth that looks at the impacts
on student associations themselves, and how they can evolve.
Advantages to Increasing Size of the Post-Secondary Sector
Massing education certainly has advantages. In the foremost, it flows more money to our
institutions and to our associations themselves. More tuition and more fees allow for
fine buildings, skilled staff and growing wages, with some efficiencies of scale. High
enrollments allow for not just nicer things, but for more things–central services at our
institutions, greater strategic funds for experimentation, and sometimes allowing for
both schools and associations to run programs that might be inefficient with fewer
students.
With this good-for-the-goose financial alignment between associations and institutions,
the benefit of a larger system has built a corresponding political alignment. It is easier to
share a growing pie than divide a shrinking one. The financial ties align, often in an
unspoken ways; both of us align on many priorities around the expansion of students,
whether that be colleges and universities supporting financial aid that nets them no
more dollars except by increased attendance, or student associations being so
sympathetic to the institutions when international student access was struck, though it
helps directly no current members of their own. This relationship is often very productive,
and putting the significantly more well resourced institutions—and their provincial and
federal alliances—-in students’ corner is a useful insurance policy against weak periods
in our own associations and alliances.
A larger post-secondary population does not just provide political benefit through
alliance. It also makes students a larger portion of the electorate, increasing the political
power of the post-secondary sector and improving the uptake of our arguments in the
political ecosystem.
Critically for the ideals of student associations, increasing post-secondary spaces has
been a tool in the fight for an egalitarian post-secondary system. In seeking a sector
where ability can lead any individual to post-secondary regardless of background, greater
enrollment is the enablement of increased access. An originally elite, white, male
institution is under transformation into a reflection of Canada’s diverse population. This
increase in enrollment is not necessary for increasing diversity, but unlike in the US,
where elite institutions do not grow, the expansionary Canadian policy space partially to
greatly preempts white male Canadians complaining that their spots are being stolen.
One other nice thing about the increase in enrollment is the subcultures and cultural
intertwining in our institutions. Subcultures, communities within our institutions, are
widely constructed, not just on classical ethno-cultural lines, but also with regard to
people’s interests and personalities. The propagation of these subcultures is
advantageous for people’s comfort and the deepening of their cultural identities, usually
for the good. Cultural intertwining is the ability for people to be exposed to a wide
breadth of other subcultures. More students, when properly managed and enriched, can
help not just develop subcultures but also span between them, and promote the broadly
desirable development of pluralist, accepting and complex graduates.
These are the advantages of this massifying of the student populous. However, there are
disadvantages in turn. I would like to argue they perhaps outweigh the opposite, or at
least merit heavy consideration.
Disadvantages
First, and not foremost—because it is not guaranteed— is a risk of lower quality of
education. Naturally, while more students may mean more niche courses offered and
innovative supports, it carries an associated risk of lower quality of education. This is
explained as higher average attendance pushes up class size. This is not, to my
knowledge, an iron-clad law, nor is a mean size truly indicative of educational quality
beyond service as the most basic proxy.
However, other issues of more definite nature are at hand as well. One incredibly
concrete issue is the multiplier effect on policy costs. Student aid is a prime example.
The cost of billions in loans and grants goes up proportionally to the number of domestic
students. Double the students, roughly double the cost. So too for work integrated
learning, mental health, PSSSP and so many more. This makes our advocacy harder in
limited fiscal environments, one lobbyist is all that is needed to push for $100M for a
program or for $250M but their chances of success will tend towards being higher in the
first, and the political power of students does not scale linearly. By this, we mean that
the power of students is one that exists more strongly as a collective concept and
embodiment of the future economy, rather than politicians drastically changing their
political calculus when post-secondary attendance goes from 2M to 2.5M, while there is
some benefit, it may not outweigh the government’s reticence to spend 25% more. It is
here also worth avoiding overstating the positive effects of a small populous: projects
half as large are not twice as likely to be granted by the government, but it is a
consideration.
A third effect is that larger attendance simultaneously permits and encourages both
institutions and provinces to use a tuition-based approach to post-secondary education.
It thereby keeps us not only in a high-fee–high-aid system, as scale cannot completely
lower tuition, but it also feeds into a high-fee–high-attendance model; as tuition levels
rise and by combination with tacit government permission or endorsment of having many
students, this approach makes the marginal value of some types of student very high for
institutions, creating a feedback loop and a dependency on the student resources
stream. For the government’s part, this increase allows them to distribute core operating
grants without substantial increases, making it unlikely that provinces would stand in the
way of institutions continuing to expand. As soon as the base increases, the marginal
revenue that comes from a $1 increase in average tuition gets higher too, making tuition
more attractive to institutions if they are permitted.
However, this extra revenue brings another issue, the dark side of scale that few people
like to talk about. While not a universal law, much of the additional positive effect on
operating budgets fail to materialize at aggressive rates. Revenue does not scale as it
should. The mechanism is not hard to guess, even if it can be hard to talk about.
Additional revenue leads to changes in university compensation. A growing pie is usually
shared, and labour is one of the diners. A largely unionized group in Canada, and
enabled by rising tuition, these unions have done their job in securing higher wages,
especially in larger institutions.
The second diner at the table is the administrata, who create new positions within the
bureaucracy and also negotiate pay raises, sometimes through unions. The creation of
new positions is what can technically be deemed a “triple-whammy”. First, new positions
require new compensation, even if a single job is split in two with no additional tasks, it
is unlikely the compensation would split in half. The second whammy is that if a
manager goes from having 3 direct reports to 4, they are enabled to bargain a higher
salary, pointing out the high wages of those they manage and negotiate a higher wage.
The third whammy is that there is also a tendency to expect a gulf between the pay level
of a manager and a subordinate, so not only is the addition of a new role benefiting the
new employee and their manager, but can ripple so forth up the chain. So, adding new
positions benefits not only the direct hiree, but their managers. Resultingly only a portion
of expenditure is taken up by new (non-managerial) work by new hirees. And of course,
this benefit is at the cost of students, quite literally, as it dilutes efficiencies of scale.
There also is a fourth diner, when one truly considers it. As the amount of funds in the system go up, there are inevitably some hands that delve into the cookie jar from the janitors at the school. When wealth is pretty common on campuses due to more students adding to the effective tax base, thefts by janitors, if not caught red handed, are common from safes in administration offices (you can see work by Alponhse for more info).
Another risk with great attendance is the weakening of cross-subsidization, possibly. Arts
and humanities are delivered in smaller classes, and with lower tuition. While a plain
doubling of all programs should mean cross-subsidisation may actually become more
efficient, there is a possibility that if expansion comes at the addition of new programs,
cross-subsidization becomes less viable. There is a worse option than simple salary
cannibalism however—disproportionate increases to arts students programs that are
more labour-intensive. This is to say, not all growth is equal, not just in terms of tuition
dollars, but also in cost of educational delivery.
Finally, and perhaps most starkly, is the impacts of our advocacy for our members’
long-term economic interests. Canada is a leading contender for the most educated
country in the world. This may be to the benefit of the country and its employers, but it is
also a prisoner’s dilemma that drives down the value of credentials when degrees exist
in a state of abundance rather than scarcity, at least if one believes that some jobs are
not readily fillable by those without degrees. This goes for other credentials as well.
When we treat our constituency as the educable population rather than the population in
education, we make a grave error. We in theory owe nothing to the former, yet we act for
their benefit to the determinant of the latter. This is not to be understated-because not
only do we by embracing the model of mass education dilute core operational funding
such that tuition is higher, the very individuals for whom tuition is higher receive less
market value for their increased tuition.
A Note on “The Two Post-Secondaries”
One last note that is important to consider, even if it is not a risk, is that Canada’s
university education system is not a producer of one product but two. Credentials are the
immediate benefit to the economy, but the universities, and increasingly the colleges,
also produce research. Research is a rival good to education when it comes to tuition
dollars; you have to pay, most of the time, for a package deal, subsidizing research
activity. We and post-secondary institutions often deploy students as a benefit for the
public without focusing on the fact that we can increase educational delivery without
increasing research output. Canada is small, and there is an element of national pride in
believing competing above our weight on research on the global stage is positive, but
one must always consider that a great deal of this research is balanced on the financial
backs of students.
II. Tools for Reform
If we now have a vision about the relationship between an expanding student body and
its impacts, for good and ill, we can now imagine some implications for how things may
change if we intentionally decouple our advocacy from this premise, and furthermore, if
there is a way to do so in a way that does not existentially imperil our partners in such a
way that deprives us of our working relationships. Likewise, we must navigate any
discussion on this in the view that we must due it in such a way that provokes neither
progressives who are inclined to the labour considerations of post-secondary institution
employees and general defenders of post-secondary education, nor conservatives who
may view a higher per-student spending habit distasteful to their fiscal responsibility
palate. Losing the buy-in of any of these groups, or of students themselves, would
jeopardize the tenuous social buy-in for student associations as worthy of de facto
protection as quasi-taxing bodies. Moving to a model that is less in the public interest is
one that cannot be taken lightly.
Not all of these tools are related directly to reduction in numbers of students, but all of
them are focused on making it easier to improve affordability while shrinking either
student enrollment or the scope and size of post-secondary institutions and their staff.
With that disclaimer, let us look at tools, and then later jump into strategies for
implementing them.
Enrollment Corridors
The first tool is simple, which is effectively winding back the clock, pushing provinces to
establish and/or decrease the size of their enrollment corridors. This is perhaps best
illuminated by looking at the international student restrictions by the federal government.
However, domestic student thinking is also a potential tool. Ontario already does this,
and expanding some form of the model in other provinces could lead to smaller
institutions. Such an action essentially promotes the trimming of instructional staff,
followed by administrative staff. In extreme cases it may lead to financial exigency. And it
will, by power of labour, remove many nice-to-haves before the decrease in compensation
hits.
Differentiation
The second strategy is differentiation, also occasionally referenced as specialization. In
this strategy, we would ask provinces to convene and coordinate the activities of
institutions, forsaking the local generalist nature of institutions and increasing their
specialization. This would allow fewer low-enrollment classes, improving efficiency for
instructor salaries, and fighting the Baumolian trap of stagnant teaching productivity.
This would only go so far in improving efficiency. In some ways it could also impede
efficiency if courses required for other majors aren’t available. For example, an
anthropology course required for a kinesiology degree would not be available at one
institution. That institution may be then financial incentivized to create an equivalent
course housed in its kinesiology department, negating efficiency gains. Therefore, this
tool must be paired with investments in online instruction for courses in high demand for
compulsory non-major courses. This may or may not necessitate province-wide university
systems that unify who is to deliver what, and ensuring that students at other
institutions are not at a disadvantage applying for courses online at another institution.
Credential Design
The third tool is reducing the student body through changing the nature of credentials.
Though many have focused on the potential of microcredentials as a way to obviate
normal four-year degrees, a shift to three-year degrees is worth looking at. It may be
possible to shrink the amount of necessary electives, as it is an easy way to decrease
the amount of students by one quarter, even while the number of degrees earned
remains the same, spreading government investment less widely. There are implications
for the quality of learning, but those are things that must be considered in pedagogical
discussions, and there may be real potential to get similar outcomes out of similar
periods of study, for some, maybe even many credentials.
Research/Teaching Distinctions
The fourth option comes from a place of recognizing that research is an economic rival
to teaching, and at least in universities causes as much as 25-50% of instructor time to
not be spent on teaching. Canada is a small nation, seeking to have a competitive global
position in research, but we must recognise that it is built on the backs of students. The
tool that exists in response to this reality is a long-term decrease in the research
complement of universities, and the delivery of teaching through teaching stream
individuals without a research role. This could, even without shrinking the student body,
address costs. It may be especially relevant in some lower productivity areas of study,
where revenue being brought in is causing a need for cross-subsidisation, at least within
the university environment. It should also be noted that this may adversely affect the
number of graduate students that the university can support. Furthermore, for these
savings to be realized it is required to think about how the recouped savings must be
considered. Savings must be realized either at the government, university, or student
end. If recouped at the university end, and captured by administrator salaries for fiscal
performance, higher salaries for teaching staff as a payoff, or higher salaries for
research faculty due to increased prestige, the effect is neutered for students. A more
maximalist vision of this tool might be to hire teaching-only instructors at an even lower
wage than old mixed-role faculty. However, the palatability of this may be
counterproductive to the level of not wishing to pursue it. Furthermore, an attrition
promise is likely going to make this more palatable than enforcing this on entrenched
individuals.
Summer Semesters
Another tool is advocating for summer semesters, and critically, the requirement that
instructors be required to instruct in the summer as well, possibly finding creative ways
to enable them to still find 2-4 weeks for vacation each year, whether that is more
frequent sabbatical leave, exam scheduling, increasing guest lectures or requiring
teachers only to teach every-other or every-third summer. In doing so, every instructor, at
similar salaries, can deliver 50% more teaching and marking hours, and the average
infrastructure requirements for students would shrink, even as they have a chance to
work more early in their lives, which is of benefit to both them and society.
Research Funding Changes and “Chairs”
Another tool is advocacy that would support the decrease of research funding, whether
general Tri-Council spending on a non-student basis or the Canada Research Chairs,
which are especially bad as they pull instructors away from teaching. This would free up
federal fiscal room for investments in provincial post-secondary transfers. Likewise,
advocating for fewer, but slightly larger student awards could improve the lives of a larger
range of graduate students than those who are hurt, as those who lose a marginal
award are almost definitely going to be able to attend graduate studies.
Another tool is increasing the number of federally funded teaching positions, possibly by
shifting research funding over to “teaching chairs”. This approach could have a
complimentary approach to defunding research chairs.
Institutional Mergers and Closures
Another tool is that of institutional merger, which can occur either on an administrative
basis, or a geographic basis, depending on whether there is consolidation at a
geographic location, or whether the merger is only at the organizational level. There are
some small efficiencies to be gained that can be pushed back to students, but mergers
can also be used to effectuate reductions in students numbers, while improving the
efficiency of instructors, making their classrooms, ironically, more full with fewer
students.
Full closures of campuses may also be worth consideration in extreme cases, especially
as part of an overall differentiation strategy. Satellite campuses have been a major play
by institutions to increase enrollment through drawing students in those locales. It is
obvious that in the case of a shrinking system, fully reconsidering those campuses may
be needed, especially in service of larger class service delivery elsewhere.
Pensions
Another tool, drastic though it may be, is intervention in public regulation of pension
policy to force out those past normal retirement age who have high salaries. Case law on
age discrimination exists, but there maybe a case for a renewed societal look at whether
the reasoning in cases still holds, or whether length of service is a better and less
discriminatory indicator than age alone, despite their semi-aligned status.
In particular, a possible tool is providing incentives for retirement and to start drawing on
pensions lest they face penalties in those investments such as not counting certain
years as pensionable or toward a highest 5 earnings years. This can be powerful and
lower the average wage of an instructor by shortening their average service. Care may be
taken to preserve the benefits of tenure by not allowing reforms to give administration
tools or incentives to get rid of people due to bona fide expressions of academic
freedom, such as voiding these penalties for favoured or “required” personnel. However,
academics should be seen as a particular class of employee different than most
employees, and perhaps special public consideration that the benefits of high pay and
tenure may merit greater employer control over retirement dates may be worthy of further
public debate.
Core Operating Grants
A final tool, and one that isn’t that novel, is advocating for more spending per student.
While the goal is different, a tactic of advocating for it within the context of a shrinking
system is a new one.
Doing this would provide the option to institutions to choose to decrease their student
numbers if they wanted to. To avoid core operating grant increases leading to further
expansion, some design choices must be made, like pairing with an enrollment corridor,
or through having substantially higher per-student grants for smaller institutions. Higher
grants for smaller institutions may promote some inefficient practices, so pairing that
bonus with a look at higher average class size or higher student:faculty ratios may be a
component of that tool that increases its workability.
III. Strategic Level Post-Secondary Direction
That’s the toolbox, so what about strategies, how does a province or post-secondary
institution deploy these tools?
Finding a strategy is an activity that should minimize harms while addressing most of the
problems that size brings, while also minimizing impacts of losers, and simultaneously
prioritizing winners and losers. This is a tall order, but one solution doesn’t need to be
perfect, especially as the first order effect of this approach is freeing up extra money
that might be used to improve the welfare of other groups. As such, additional tools can
be deployed to address some of the worse impacts of these tools. I have already
detailed some of the most natural countervailing strategic points into some of these
tools, but some further mitigations are wise to explore.
General Approaches
The general strategy should be directed to minimize political fallout, which necessarily
means multi-year planning and mult-year commitment, gradual change, and a
government commitment that if fewer students are to study, that the institutions may
recoup some portion of the remitting operating grants in the form of increased per-capita
student grants. Thereby, while core operating grant totals shall decrease, the ideal
situation is that teaching salaries move in a general upward direction for those who
remain in the profession. The government must also, for the sake of maintaining
consent of the polity ensure that some such portion of this delta in spending is remitted
in the form of reductions either to tuition, or in the form of low caps to tuition increases.
If a province doesn’t already have regulated tuition that it wants to shift down in rate, an
alternative approach is a legislated maximum to staff and professional salaries or
raises, which ensures that instead of additional funds being gobbled by salary increases
and managerial expansion, funds are likely to be diverted to real capacity improvements,
the bottom line or reduced tuition rates.
An intentional strategy with shared understanding of roles is paramount. The approach
to international students in these early years of the 2020s is a prime example of what
non-coordination can look like. This is not to say changes must be small– just not
sudden. This also lends itself to the supposition that a strategy is best undertaken at a
system level, rather than an institutional level, though it is not inconceivable to imagine
piloting or enterprising examples that might buck this supposition and support
institution-by-institution approaches. It is easier to coordinate intention across an entire
system so that expectations are clear for the entirety of society instead of seeing
changes as some form of marketing gimmick deployed by individual colleges and
universities.
Interaction with Government
There is no real gradual way to deal with mergers or campus closures or layoffs that
result from them. A second major strategy is that deployment of tools should be
accompanied by something from government that allows for dramatic sets of changes to
be accommodating, giving institutions time to adjust without funding being an immediate
concern. This kind of funding would provide, for example, money for adequate and just
contract buyouts.
For communities losing institutions, giving enough time for closure allows both students
and communities time to plan for transition, and if the government is confident in its
system vision, the political mobilization over those two to four years of warning should
be easily and steadfastly rejected.
Equity Strategies
A third strategic pillar is that of ensuring that tools do not lead to adverse impacts on
marginalized students. For example, if there are concerns around fewer spots leading to
lower degrees of access for them, standardized testing is a broadly equitable way to
address merit concerns and fight against any attempt to exclude minorities of any type.
Though there will inevitably be socio-economic inequality in this approach, US evidence
seems to suggest that it is superior to most alternatives. A quota system based on
either racial or combined racial-other dimensions may be a stronger option, but also is
one that proved broadly politically unpalatable in the United States.
However, the US does provide an affirmative action derivative that is useful for our
purposes. The “Texas 10” approach was a rule instituted in Texas for its public schools
instead of affirmative action that would ensure that the Top 10% (now 6%) of every Texas
high school graduating class received admission to any public university in the state
(though not guaranteed entry into every program). While Canada may not have as strong
a geographic-socioeconomic alignment, this would be a model that could easily be
adopted to help improve equity in the space. This may not work for some individuals that
are close-to-homogeneically spread between schools with lower grades but high
potential, such as those with disabilities, but in the belief that secondary schools are
grading consistently within their own student population, it should be broadly equitable.
It would also reduce a need for grade inflation as a mechanism for interschool
competition.
Approaches to Reductions-in-Staff
A fourth strategic pillar is how to manage the decrease in staff. The easiest approach is
solely one of attrition of instructional staff, slightly rejigging the roles of remaining staff
over time. The other option is one that pushes for a more accelerated buyout approach
that may be assisted by the government in return for concessions on the differentiation
of their institutions. A federal government may seek to assist through giving employers
the option to organize their pensions with contributions over some ages, such as 70, to
not count towards benefits.
For non-instructional roles, there is a chance that they are seen as less scalable, and
harder to decrease in scope as students decrease, as they serve core administrative
efforts. However, almost without exception, administrative staffs were smaller and with
smaller scopes in the past, or individuals were expected to be less specialized. A
province has little power to make determinations on who should be let go themselves,
but they may be empowered to provide bonuses in core funding to institutions who
reduce staff spending, increasing the marginal incentive for the institution to reduce its
expenditure.
Interinstitutional Coordination
Another strategy is to coordinate any differentiation, so as to ensure that tool
deployment is not detrimental in nature to those who are also undergoing changes in
good faith. If the goal is that institutions are to specialize, it would be beneficial to not
have them all specialize in the same direction. Managing it such that differentiation
comes in steadily would also prevent students being orphaned – their programmes
expiring before graduation.
IV. Changes in Student Union Behaviour
With these broader strategies established, what are the implications for SU/SAs in
particular, and specifically their advocacy? While general knowledge of the Section II
Tools and Section III strategies is a priority area, there are other specific areas where
student associations are particularly well suited to pivot to.
Rhetorical Changes
For SUs, there are a few methods to proceed with, if they wanted to reconsider the mass
education push. The first are simple rhetorical chances. They should stop lazy language
that posits more education as a universal good. One can address specific societal skills
gaps and the potential of filling them as beneficial for both individual and country without
saying things like that education should be universal. This is a matter of art rather than
science, there are no magic words to avoid at all times. But it is worth putting things
through the lens to see if they inadvertently point towards that idea. I talk often about
education being a great leveller, or talk about universal access – but try to do so with
rhetorical guardrails that arouse a balanced viewpoint in the rhetorical consumer’s mind.
This might look like saying “all willing and qualified high school students should attend
post-secondary” instead of “all post-secondary students should receive higher
education”, but even better might be “we should ensure that post-secondary education
remains a great choice for many students”, instead of saying “most.
In some way, our own language around “higher” education even is something to harken
back to with skepticism. “Higher” is inherently aspirational. Getting away from the idea
that all should aspire to it, and toward neutral language, something like “abstract” or
just “university” or “degree-based” or “diploma-based” education might be more
appropriate and precise. For a collective, maybe we can say that both college and
undergraduate university education can be classified as “course-centred” education, so
as to distinguish it from “workplace-centred” education. Yes co-ops and placements and
apprenticeship course blocks exist. If you can do better, I encourage you to do so.
Changes in Equity Thinking
The second strategy beyond the rhetorical is a proposed change to the way that student
associations think about and advocate for equity. One compelling theory of how backlash
against equity goes is McGhee’s filled in swimming pool, where rather than having black
and white kids integrated in public swimming pools, US cities would just fill in the pools,
depriving everyone. An alternative to integration that may have kept most people happy
would be to build three or four times more pools, which would allow segregated pools,
so black individuals could swim without offending the sensibilities of thoroughly racist
whites. But while wrong to actually pursue this as opposed to integration, it is also worth
mentioning that even if they pursued this thinking, towns were more or less too poor to
do so.
We have promoted equity through realizing that we can avoid sensibilities around
increased competition for spots just by increasing the number of spots. But if we are in a
space-constrained environment, we have to figure out how to manage access to the
proverbial pool fairly, essentially finding a way to make all people welcome in a lower
capacity space. In Canada, race no longer plays a big role in admissions
post-segregation, at least not at the American sense of affirmative action. Going down
an American route can polarize postsecondary in an undesirable way, but ignoring the
problems the come with space constraint could create incentives for undesirable
practices like legacy-based admissions, or only admitting those who can pay a higher
tuition rate. The easiest way to facilitate this is for student associations to be actively
thinking about methods that can assess, with lessened bias, candidates for admittance.
This requires a change in mindset. Student associations could move from looking at
changing whether we view equity from a place of viewing a person in the several and
asking how to make it more likely that they instead PSE and instead focus on the
question of whether those that are accepted or rejected from PSE are accepted or
rejected equitably and whether the demographics of a school or PSE system are broadly
reflective of the general population. Those driving questions move us away from a
pre-supposed push for enrollment expansion towards an approach that considers equity
as independent of the size of enrollment. Instead SU equity thinking could focus on
procedural equity rather than equity in a more abstract vision of uplifting entire
demographic groups in their entirety. It embraces competition as a neutral rather than a
negative element, and it especially tackles the sense that competition is generating
disparity, and instead focuses resolving inequity through refinement of process.
The tool of standardized testing that has been shown to be superior in equalizing access
than the level of equalization in its absence, and likewise the aforementioned “Top 10%”
approach may provide ample opportunity for student associations to engage in weighty
policy that nonetheless supports equitable outcomes. This may feel like it is ignoring
systemic level reform beyond the post-secondary sector, but in this case, the classical
approach that centres procedural equity is actually in service of systemic change, just
more narrowly scoped within the sector.
Convincing Government to Shrink the Sector
A third strategy for SUs is creating a set of conditions that make it conducive and
attractive to society to make a more financially sustainable and smaller equilibrium.
The easiest system is a tri-elemental bargain:
● acquiescing to or soliciting a higher rate or tuition,
● counteracting equity concerns through a needs-based adjustment to student aid,
and;
● The ultimate goal, an increase in core operating grants
So long as 𝚫tuition>𝚫grants+𝚫aid per student enrolled, the typical government should
be broadly interested in a proposal, as it puts them in a position to decrease public
spending on post-secondary education in the long run. As generally the amount of
institutional revenue in the form of tuition is less than the combined provincial
expenditure on aid and core operating grants, post-secondary operates at a net loss for
the province, and a decrease in students thus “frees up” some of that deficit. If the
average student at a university pays roughly $4000 in tuition a term, the university
receives $6000 in operating grants, and the government pays out $1000 of the tuition in
grants, the student represents a net $3000 cost per term. If the university drops from
10000 to 9000 students, then those missing $1000 students free up $3 million a term
in net public financials, if tuition remains steady. Student efforts should be put towards
minimizing the 𝚫tuition>𝚫grants+𝚫aid delta, which is likely best done through core
operating grant advocacy.
This 𝚫tuition>𝚫grants+𝚫aid has led to a core bargain, one where the cost of
post-secondary will necessarily fall on the affluent within society. Lower income students
get aid to help them on their way. This non-universal option is the generally progressive
answer to stable institutional budgets and access. This is stated not taking away from
the fact that income is also potentially hard earned and already taxed disproportionately.
There are a few ways to think about how students can create political space using this
framework.
First, a modest tuition increase approach is not a necessary bargain, but may be
excellent political cover under which the government might impose enrollment caps, with
student sanction. This is because post-secondary institutions in this circumstance know
that what they might lose in scale, they might gain back partially in margin, even while
they might also gain per-student grants. This would be a possible course to pursue in a
space that pushes for higher government aid, or if there is student union feeling that the
institution needs more resources, or if there is a desire for more predictable tuition, or if
there are other concessions to be won from a government or school, or if it is a requisite
part of the bargain in order to get government support.
Another approach is the high tuition-low aid approach, which would trust institutions to
increase tuition and manage access on their end with an enrollment cap but no cuts,
possibly aided by high operating grants from the government, part of which institutions
would then invest into scholarships or access initiatives.
Another approach is a lowering approach on tuition, where effort is not placed on
increasing aid, and instead on operating grants, in such a way as to decrease tuition.
This approach is somewhat self-explanatory.
Finally, there is a high-grant-no tuition strategy, one that imposes strict government
rationing on spaces in post-secondary and eliminates tuition entirely. This is the most
government-expensive option. Without any tuition to soften the blow, this would imply
most provinces would have to decrease their enrollment by at least a factor of 2. In a
way, this is the maximalist version of this enrollment reduction vision, but I believe that it
likely provides weird government incentives in the long run, may deliver a level of
educated population so far below business demand as to cause uproar and hurt social
benefit and may push individuals to private institutions.
Credential Reform
Another system is embracing the lowering of requirements for degrees as a training
option. This may seem counter-intuitive for making degrees more valuable, but what it
does do is pushing fewer to post-secondary, especially university, by rote. In the long run,
if we truly believe degrees are valuable, this will benefit graduates in the fields that truly
do need credentials.
The natural nature of degrees of this nature is that they make these humans superior to Ai models, at least in terms of the skills of calcium slinging.
The policy tools to do this are not exactly something that I have a good sense of. To
start, one might want to do licensing reform and pro-apprenticeship policy, and fighting
credentialism–selectively. This may appear to be something that devalues a degree or
credential if we admit that the role does not actively require a credential to do, but it
also has the effect of causing fewer enrollees in credentials, and therefore gives space
for the credentials to differentiate their holders. It furthermore draws attention to the
careers that maintain the requirement.
Quality
I shall leave discussions of quality for a different time. Suffice to say that there are
unique considerations: thinking about efficient downsizing of core services, as well as
optimizing curricula for smaller average classroom sizes, in the not-guaranteed case that
smaller class sizes come to pass instead of larger ones. Furthermore, associations
themselves must put their minds to shrinking their programming, as well as optimizing
for a more tight-knit campus.
As previously mentioned, differentiation is also a factor that a prudent student
association should be aware of and seek to advance, if that is the model pursued
provincially for savings.
Influence within Institutions
In a period of transition, the transformational student association must seek to ensure
that savings are realized not squandered, and doing so requires building bridges to the
administration, keeping focus on core objectives, and pushing institutions to be relatively
conservative in terms of what concessions are given to academic labour unions in terms
of long-term commitments. Likewise, good relations with an administration need not be
limited to looking at savings being recognized on the teaching front, but an eye for
redundancy can also make student associations advocates for streamlining and
prioritizing administrative and support functions. This is especially relevant in a shrinking
institution.
International Students
A corollary of increased core funding and wanting fewer degrees in Canada overall is
probably a policy that pushes for fewer international students, or at least an
international student system that leads to less permanent migration to Canada.
However, it is important to consider that student associations do not have a sole, nor
even a primary obligation to domestic students above international ones, and any policy
advocacy should not try to disadvantage those in their membership.
It is however relevant to note that despite this, both current domestic and international
students benefit from a more restrictive international student policy for those who come
after them.
Real policy thinking in this space is mostly tied to two elements. First, the overall
funding environment and second, seeking to challenge government rhetoric on
international or global talent as the primary way to plug labour gaps. A current student
should want low unemployment domestically as it drives wage premiums, and that is
more easily facilitated through policy related to retraining than by acquiescing to
business considerations and importing a pool of labour that is cheaper for businesses
than investing in their own training or domestic taxes sufficient to have a robust
re-training regime. However, there is a countervailing consideration, which is that
international students cross-subsidize domestic students, and do so with relative
openness to the higher tuition that entails.
Coda
These are only some of what other thinkers may come up with, but this is meant to be
an elegy for a more dignified degree experience, and a caution against mass education
without reason.
Finally, I want to make clear that student unions don’t need to adopt all of these stances, but cogency is important. Elsewise people will judge you and you might actually lose points in the student union wonk-ratings systems maintained by some umbrella organizations like CASA.