The UC way
Could California be a model for Canadian research policy?
For all the erudition and scholarship that goes on at Canadian campuses, ambition is what really drives most colleges and universities. Colleges want to be small universities. Small universities want to be big universities. And big universities want to be Harvard.
Evidence of this aspiration is everywhere. In Alberta, a pair of community colleges just became universities. The same thing happened last year in British Columbia. In Ontario, Brock University in St. Catharines has embarked on an aggressive marketing campaign to rebrand itself from small regional university to higher-status research centre. And then there’s the recent furor created by the aspirations of five of Canada’s biggest universities.
In an exclusive interview with Maclean’s in August, the presidents of the University of British Columbia, University of Alberta, University of Toronto, McGill University and Université de Montréal outlined a controversial proposal to realign national post-secondary funding. Under the Big Five plan, a few schools would emphasize high-level research while the remaining schools would focus primarily on undergraduate education. That would allow a more efficient distribution of scarce research funding, vault the Big Five closer to their international peers, and tackle the issue of Canada’s underperformance in producing world-class university research.
It’s clearly an ambitious plan, as far as the Big Five are concerned. But is limiting the ambition of every other college and university the best plan for Canada? And what would such a plan look like?
You have to look elsewhere for an example. In the U.S., many states set out explicit expectations for all public post-secondary institutions, and California’s Master Plan for Higher Education, created in 1960, is one of the best known.
At the top of the state hierarchy is the University of California, which boasts many of the world’s most famous campuses, including Berkeley and UCLA. Its nine institutions receive the bulk of research funding, focus heavily on graduate students, and are the only public universities in California allowed to grant Ph.D.s. UC accepts the top 12 per cent of all state high school graduates. Next come 23 California State campuses. Cal States are primarily undergraduate institutions. Professors teach twice as many classes as their peers at UC and do much less research. The top third of California high school graduates are guaranteed a place in the Cal State system. Finally, more than 100 state community colleges act as feeders for Cal State. They are required to offer a spot for every high school graduate in California. “The two key aspects of the master plan are a clear differentiation of which students go where, as well as which schools do what,” says Todd Greenspan, director of academic planning at the University of California office of the president. “Everyone knows their place.”
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You should know however that the Master Plan (which promised affordability, access and diversity in California universities) is all but dead at this point with the approx. 1 billion $ budget cuts that were applied both to the CSU and the UC systems.
Did this really get reported without a mention of the wage cuts, furloughs, layoffs, and financial (mis)management that lead to mass walk out of faculty, staff and students at UC just this last week??
In addition, graduate tuition at UC just skyrocketted between 17 and 67% (with undergrad raised 30%)!
Seriously: Was this written last winter and just put aside for a time when they needed to fill webspace or did the author only contact the office of the UC president and not bother to read a newspaper?
I offer two suggestions that would allow Canada’s post-secondary education system to evolve into a differentiated system that puts students first.
1. Funding of students, researchers and universities.
Leave the federal system of research funding alone – it works fine, with lots of stiff competition between individuals and institutions.
Provinces should split the funding currently provided to universities as follows:
40% directly to all qualified students, to be paid by them to the institutions that they choose to attend, as opposed to the current system where institutions get the money first.
40% to institutions for research; this would allow the universities to differentiate themselves by their choices of how they spend it and what they spend it on. One may become highly focused; another may choose the status quo. They could also make strategic decisions to reinforce federally-funded research, thereby strengthening the differentiation proposed by the Big Five presidents.
20% for service; this would allow the universities to differentiate themselves by their impact on their communities.
2. Who should be entitled to a university education in Canada?
All smart and motivated students, typically with a 65% or better highschool grade average.
Increasingly, as our students, institutions, businesses and our country compete on a global scale, Canadian Universities surely have an opportunity if not an obligation to demonstrate leadership by creating access to higher learning for more students.
Dr. David Strong, PhD, DSc, LLD, FRSC, President and Vice Chancellor University Canada West
“Everyone knows their place” ?
Ew. This made me cringe.
If the five big universities want a large concentration of research funding in one place, why don’t four of them give all their research funding to the other one. Then they would get the large concentration research funding that they want in one university, without screwing up all the other smaller universities.
Its all politics,
in the case where say provinces need more money you don’t see them dipping into their own wages (in fact they give themselves raises) instead money comes from others, preferably those without as much power to complain.