March 2001
Missing Pieces Misses the Goals of Advanced Education
by Hymie Rubenstein
The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) has produced the second edition of a report called Missing Pieces II: An Alternative Guide to Canadian Post-Secondary Education. It finds that impoverished Manitoba has one of the best systems of advanced education in Canada. Not only does the province rank third overall, it has shown the greatest one-year improvement in the country. This happy occurrence corresponds with the replacement in 1999 of a right-of-centre Progressive Conservative government by a left-of-centre NDP regime.
Since poverty-stricken Manitoba has one of the best systems of advanced education in Canada, it follows (using CCPA logic) that rich and politically right-leaning Ontario and Alberta should have among the worst education systems. And so they do, being ranked tenth and eight, respectively. Not unexpectedly, the two top-ranking provinces, British Columbia and Quebec, also have left-wing governments.
If this looks like Maclean’s magazine’s annual ranking of Canadian universities turned on its head, it is. Maclean’s places the University of Toronto, Queen’s, and University of Alberta first, third, and sixth, respectively, out of Canada’s 15 mega-universities. The University of Manitoba currently sits in 14th place on this ranking, a rise of one over its nearly annual last-place position.
As the CCPA implicitly concedes, the disparity between the rankings does not rest on the fact that it is comparing provinces; it includes community colleges in its study, while Maclean’s compares only universities. The CCPA study rests on the ranking indices themselves, none of which have any intrinsic relation to the quality of teaching and research. These indices include such measures as gender equity (defined by the proportion of female students and professors at post-secondary institutions), the percentage of highly educated poor people (where Manitoba would be bound to rank highly if only because it allegedly has so many poor people), tuition rates (the lower the tuition, the higher the institution is ranked), the per capita amount spent on post-secondary education (where Manitoba must again rank highly because its community college system, which is always much cheaper to operate than universities, is among the least developed in the land), and accountability (the proportion of public funding devoted to post-secondary budgets).
This last variable especially highlights the extent to which a particular ideology rather than a concern with high system performance and quality education informs the CCPA study. "We have ranked provinces poorly if they rely strongly on private donations or student fees, because universities and colleges are public institutions and should be funded from the provincial (and therefore federal) budget," Missing Pieces II claims (p. 9). This is a political/moral decision, not a pedagogical or scholarly one, which makes an implicit but misleading distinction between clean money and dirty money.
All money for post-secondary education ultimately comes from a single set of donors—individual and corporate taxpayers—because governments have no other revenue source. But according to the CCPA, education dollars are "clean" money only when forcibly extracted through the tax system. Tuition fees are "dirty" money because they come from individuals rather than from the state, and because they are voluntarily remitted.
Of no consequence to the CCPA is the fact that such fees, even when based on large student loans, represent the best possible investment young people could make in enhancing their life chances while expanding their intellectual horizons. Nor does the Centre recognize that high tuition fees may also encourage students to make more rational choices about how to best spend their scarce education dollars.
At least as bad as tuition fees are voluntary gifts from private benefactors. In Manitoba, the most generous of these private donors is Can-West Global media mogul and philanthropist Izzie Asper, who has donated millions of dollars in recent years to his alma mater, the University of Manitoba.
Such altruism represents dirty money for CCPA because it believes that the universities and colleges should have only a single patron, the state. Missing Pieces II never explains why this should be so, or why a single source of compulsory tax support makes for a better system of post-secondary education. Common sense and the experience of the great private American universities (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and others) suggests that proportionately less coerced public money and a greater variety of funding sources enhance institutional independence while promoting scholarly excellence and protecting academic freedom. This is because reliance mainly on the government (and the right that this gives the provinces to appoint so many members of the institutions’ governing councils) makes post-secondary institutions political footballs that can be kicked in one direction or the other depending on the whims of the current government. It also leaves these institutions cash starved or cash rich depending on serendipitous political policies and fluctuating treasury budgets.
But the most troubling part of the CCPA’s study is that its narrow range of indices involve mainly input variables that have no inherent relationship to academic outcomes. This is why the Maclean’s ranking is far more credible. The magazine measures many more items, including input variables that are reasonably good proxies for high scholastic quality (incoming students’ high school grades; the proportion of out-of-province students; the proportion of the budget devoted to the library; how many faculty win national awards and the proportion who are successful in securing federal government research grants). Maclean’s also places a high emphasis on what many researchers consider to be the most important index of a university’s stature, its reputation. (Why do so many outstanding students and faculty alike try to get into Harvard? Because it has such an outstanding reputation. Why does Harvard have such an outstanding reputation? Because so many outstanding people try to get into Harvard. This is a tautology, but it works).
Factors such as actual learning outcomes, faculty research productivity, and overall institutional calibre are of little concern in the CCPA study because they have the unhappy effect of "reinforcing competition between individual institutions" and "have been used to vilify or promote institutions." Heaven forbid that universities should compete with each other for the brightest and best students, and that the results of this competition be made public!
Since the University of Manitoba is among the least competitive and most vilified of Canadian universities, the obverse of its Ontario and Alberta counterparts, it looks as if the report’s authors deliberately selected provinces and comparative indicators to conform to the CCPA’s egalitarian socialist agenda. For the CCPA, what really counts in advanced education are equity and accessibility, even if their pursuit produces a uniformly mediocre post-secondary system. After all, it’s their vision of the Canadian way.
Source
Denise Doherty-Delorme and Erika Shaker (eds.), Missing Pieces II: An Alternative Guide to Canadian Post-Secondary Education. Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, 2000-2001. Available on the internet at www.policyalternatives.ca.
Hymie Rubenstein is a professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba and author of the recent Fraser Institute Public Policy Source, Rewarding University Professors: A Performance-Based Approach.
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