Tie education funding to results: panel
A Mackinnon panel recommendation that funding for Alberta schools and post-secondary institutions should be partly tied to their performance is raising observer’s eyebrows.
The panel, headed by former Saskatchewan finance minister Janice Mackinnon, took a deep dive into government spending and recommended stepping away from funding models that rely solely on school or college enrolment.
It follows a United Conservative Party election promise to link university and college funding to their labour-market outcomes.
In its report, released Tuesday, the panel urged government to lift the university tuition freeze, work with institutions to set an overall direction for the post-secondary system, and quickly assess the viability of some institutions.
It recommended universities rely less on government funding and look for other revenue. Panel members pointed to B.C. and Ontario institutions, which depend more heavily on tuition fees.
Alex Usher, a consultant and founder of Toronto-based Higher Education Strategy Associates, said Ontario students also have better access to student aid programs.
Alberta’s student aid was “gutted” by the Ed Stelmach Progressive Conservative government, he said, leading to some of the highest student debt levels in the country. What may appear as tuition funding in Ontario is actually government funding channelled through a different program, he said.
Universities will need the flexibility to charge more given the “quite obvious cuts that are coming in the next budget,” Usher said.
David Robinson, executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, said he was puzzled by the panel’s recommendation to raise tuition fees while also flagging Alberta’s relatively low rate of post-secondary participation.
“It doesn’t take a PHD in economics to know that if you raise price, you lower demand,” he said.
The panel said taxpayers aren’t getting the best value for their post-secondary investments, pointing to graduation rates below 60 per cent at nine of the province’s 26 institutions.
An accompanying analysis by KPMG said fewer than 40 per cent of students graduate from Lac La Biche’s Portage College within seven years of enrolling — the lowest rate in the province.
Finance Minister Travis Toews ruled out closing down under-performing post-secondary institutions for now, but said he expects the education and advanced education ministers will look at the recommendations with “great interest.”
Robinson said if he were dean of an arts faculty in Alberta right now, he’d be worried, since the report focuses on “a very utilitarian labour market outcomes approach.”
Alberta Teachers’ Association president Jason Schilling said such performance-based funding would see more money channelled to schools where students are already thriving, and penalize schools with large populations of vulnerable students.
That divide may be exacerbated by private, charter and Catholic schools’ ability to turn some students away, he said.
“We don’t need to start bringing bad ideas from south of the border up into our educational system, which is already the envy of the world,” Schilling told reporters on Tuesday.