Our universities can be smarter
Canada’s ‘big five’ presidents have an ambitious plan for fixing our schools, says Wells
This thing is starting to get a bit unwieldy: federal government, provincial governments, academia, industry. What are its chances of actually getting anything done? Munroe-Blum said the odds of such a meeting succeeding will increase if everyone concentrates on achieving practical results. “It may be that we aim for some pilot project. Choose a sector or two from an industry point of view, business point of view, and bring together the government and university and industry leaders who want to work together.”
And if they have time to talk about some other issues, the sky’s the limit. Naylor rattled off a half-dozen topics that could use government attention. The maze of tax credits for corporate research and development, for instance: “It’s incredibly expensive, it’s often inefficient. At a time when we have falling government revenues it needs a close look.” Or the National Research Council, the feds’ in-house research branch. “We spend $850 million a year on the NRC: is it doing what it needs to do as an applied research and commercialization entity? There’s open questions about that.”
After a decade during which governments from two different parties competed to create a forest of boutique programs to encourage the transfer of new ideas from the laboratory to the market, “it’s alphabet soup,” Naylor said. “It’s almost impossible for anyone who’s trying to build a company to navigate that.”
By the end of our discussion, then, the five presidents had established, at a minimum, that there is a lot more to discuss. Canada’s academic culture gives a serviceable education to millions and is home to pockets of genuine genius, but it often falls a little short of the world’s best. The schools that would like to win by that most exacting standard have precise ideas about how they should change to attain those goals. And they are eager to start a broader conversation about how to help Canada make it through the current economic crisis and get back on the path to greater prosperity.
Coming after a year of constant crisis in Parliament during which very few of the debates were about such substantive matters, the five presidents’ remarks came as a tonic but also as a warning. These are the topics our leaders could discuss, if they could only look up from their tactical skirmishes for a moment. And these are the issues the rest of the world will discuss, and act upon, whether Canada gets its act together or not.
So, we’ve given the ‘Big 5′ much of the federal research funding over the past decade, and they come back and tell us that in order to do any good they will need even more? Not only that but we should apparently be cutting funding to other university’s research programs? Maybe tear down a few laboratories and ship the staff off to Vancouver or Toronto?
And the argument that supports this redistribution of research efforts to the largest universities is what? Apparently simply because they are the largest universities. Large = good.
Nevermind that the world’s most renowned research schools have significantly smaller enrollments that our ‘Big 5′.
Nevermind that many of our own smaller universities have substantial research investment and infrastructure.
I’m all for improving our research and development, but I find it difficult to believe that these Presidents are motivated purely by a driving concern for Canada. It is just a coincidence that their remedy for our ailing PSE system is give more money to the largest universities.
L
[...] for less undergrads and smaller liberal arts colleges to handle the rest of us. A recent Macleans article discussed the pressing needs of Canada’s higher education, in an apparent approach by the ‘big [...]
The so-called “Big 5″ presidents make good points about the need to focus more resources on graduate education and research, but the essence of their argument remains utterly self-serving, something most in evidence with their desire to charge higher tuition.
UofT, McGill, UdeM, UofA, and UBC are not the only large research universities in the country, and I am not clear on whether their presidents wish resources to be concentrated on their institutions exclusively or on “research-intensive” schools general.
As a further aside, the article notes that UofA has five undergraduate students for every graduate student, which is supposedly an undesirably high ratio. At Dalhousie, the corresponding ratio is about 3.5 undergrad for every grad student. I suppose that would make Dal intrinsically more “research-intensive” even though it has fewer students overall. Or perhaps such ratios are not particularly important.
A fundamental financial problem to raising the graduate student:undergraduate student ratio is that you need undergrads to pay tuition bills and give teaching assistantships that support the graduate students financially. One option would be to rise tuition fees for the fewer number of undergrads, but pay more for a university that admittedly disinvested from undergraduate education, leaving it to “the rest”, and only focus on research?
i.e. “why pay more?”
A number of the above comments point out that most research focused schools in other countries have small undergrad populations and that our G5 clearly do not fit this bill.
I would suggest that the G5 have their hands tied by our system. They only grow large because our government only pays these institutions significant money for the number of undergraduates they have. They are forced to use economies of scale to skim capital with which they can then use to fuel their graduate research.
These schools are only big because their respective provincial governments force them to be so. I think they would love to decrease their undergraduate student body to the benefit of their graduates BUT the money would dry up.
We need to ask ourselves why huge numbers of undergraduates pumped through university every year is a positive. Why do we need undergraduates and why do they need university? The economy is starting to choke on this largesse and the correlation between quality of life and PSE is beginning to get weaker.
Perhaps the research created from our institutions is actually more beneficial to our society than the undergraduates they churn out themselves. Perhaps we do the public a disservice by advocating to treat all PSE institutions as the same.
“Perhaps the research created from our institutions is actually more beneficial to our society than the undergraduates they churn out themselves. Perhaps we do the public a disservice by advocating to treat all PSE institutions as the same. ”
People need to get through undergrad before they can even think of working in research.
@AF,
Yeah, I don’t think the G5 is actually calling for a reduction in the overall numbers of undergraduates in Canada. Likely they want more. They just don’t want to teach them (I guess?).
@ Anonymous,
Obviously working in research is for those who have completed an undergrad.
But I am talking about the benefit of this research (not who directly creates it), the economic and quality of life dividends that it pays to Canadian society.
Since the state (which represents the people) is footing the bill of this research and undergraduate education, the general population should be receiving the net benefit.
Training undergraduates and doing research is only a means to Canadian success not an end. I think you missed this argument of mine.
@L.Miller,
I think the article leaves this unsaid but I think in private the G5 Presidents might argue that funding the education of so many undergraduates is a waste of money (this would be a very unpopular sentiment). If we are putting money in PSE, it should go to make Canada competitive internationally (so that we can reap the dividends of technological and cultural leadership).
Thus, they probably want to see a funding formula that allows them to curb enrollment and increase undergraduate standards. They then want the government to us the savings from decreasing enrollement to better fund research.
[...] to masters and doctoral studies if the ‘Big Five’ have their way. See Paul Wells, ‘Our Universities Can be Smarter’ (Macleans 28 July [...]
People pay a lot of taxes to the government. One portion of these taxes is designated to the general education up to the undergraduate level. So, the Federal government must (not should) support our post graduate students instead of sponsoring foreign post graduate students who will most likely leave Canada at the end of their research. Also, the Federal Government should prioritize and invest in our post graduate resource system instead of involving itself in a senseless war in Afghanistan which costs us a sensless amount of tax dollars. Remember that research costs us very little – a fraction of fruitless war costs – to bring a better life to humanity and to lead us to live peacefully and meaningfully. This means that Canadians could potentially set up an excellent example for the world to follow. Eventually, war or ignorance will cease on its own because knowledge and higher education will sweep away the stains of ignorance.
These five presidents are living in a dream world if they think this type of system will ever be set up in Canada. For starters, the governments of Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Newfoundland, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island would lead an open revolt if the federal government tried to set up some special system for these five universities.
[...] the universities in Canada seems to be heating up. I recall there was some outcry after a 2009 article by Paul Wells for MacLean’s where representatives from the ‘big five’ Canadian [...]