How the Recession of 2009 Will Affect Post-Secondary Education - viewed from Canada

I thank James Pringle at Ryerson University in Toronto for calling my attention to a report from the Educational Policy Institute with the challenging title On the Brink:How the Recession of 2009 Will Affect Post-Secondary Education. The report was written by Alex Usher and Ryan Dunn .  The report focuses on post-secondary education in Canada, but many of its insights and conclusions apply to higher education more broadly.

The authors look at impacts of the recession, first on endowments, followed somewhat later by decreasing state revenues and corresponding decreasing support of post-secondary education. They discuss increasing tuition to meet some shortfalls, and the differences between Canada and the US in terms of options in this arena.  They discuss a number of institutional response options to revenue shortfalls, none of which will surprise most of my readers.

I particularly liked the discussion of what the authors dub the “Peak Post-Secondary” Scenario.  They note that around 2014 the main cohort of baby-boomers begins to retire, and at that point, costs of health and elder care begin to rise rapidly, and the percentage of workers begins to decline, thus permanently exacerbating pressure on state budgets.  Consequently, just as the recession recedes, societal priorities are likely to be pushed away from education by demographic pressure .  Thus the “Peak Post-Secondary” Scenario calls for permanently declining per-student revenues. 

In almost any scenario, the authors suggest that Institutions will need to increase revenues from non-traditional sources.  In the “Peak Post-Secondary” scenario this becomes urgent. Among the new sources, the authors recommend cross border education, but not just any cross border education:

But cross-border education is not solely about picking up bodies overseas and shipping them here; that might have been an adequate description of the game twenty years ago, but things have moved on since then. The establishment of a broad middle class in many developing countries has vastly increased the demand for post-secondary education. In particular, demand has boomed for education branded (if not provided) by large, established, Western universities is very strong in much of the world. Large public universities from North America, England and the UK have a good name in Asia and Africa – much better in many cases than the local university. The growth market in education for major Western universities lies not in attracting ever-greater numbers of students but rather in modularizing knowledge, delivering it in locally-appropriate forms through international educational partnerships, and certifying students at the end of a course or period of studies.

Sounds like a description you might have read in some of my previous posts!

However, the authors point out that revenue generation is unlikely to be sufficient to resolve the financial problems of post secondary education in the future: Institutions are also going to need to tackle their cost base. At this point, the authors begin to struggle with the challenges of fixing our near-universally broken cost/price model.  They suggest one possible change that is quite logical- and sure to be greatly controversial:

One might reasonably expect, therefore, that Peak Post-Secondary will lead to a reengineering of tasks and costs, and in particular the creation of a two-tier faculty. This will see some faculty paid to concentrate more on research and teaching graduate students, while others will be paid primarily to teach – and in some cases teach an increasingly standardized curriculum.

They suggest that this common curricula, which they view as being at the undergraduate level only,  could have both financial and educational benefits:

By adopting common curricula, many hours of instructor time could be saved – time which could be used to increase student/instructor contact and assist students in developing mastery over freely-available subject matter courses.

Obviously a break from our image of thousands of post-secondary institutions each offering its own special hand-crafted education.  However, it might well offer some educational benefits in that it focuses more on the issue of learning rather than curriculum development.

The report ends with a very important call to reality that sums things up in a way that I heartedly endorse:

Only those institutions and governments that re-think the delivery of education itself, by measuring inputs and outputs and deciding based on evidence where dollars can best be spent, can hope to come out of this recession in better shape than they came in.

Comments

[Web Development Surrey]

That was inspiring,

I would just like a brief update if that is not too much to ask?

Thanks for writing about it

Lloyd responds: thanks for your comment. I will see what I can do about an update