The Alberta government likes to brag about fiscal responsibility. The irony is that the Alberta government's new approach to post-secondary education (PSE) seems to be lacking one crucial dimension: responsibility.

Most obviously, there is the lack of responsibility for adequate funding. Alberta's post-secondary system lost 21% of its government funding between 1994 and 1997 as part of deficit-control measures. This loss, when coupled with spiralling enrollments and stagnant funding throughout the 1980s, has resulted in a 37% decline per-student since 1982 (real-dollar funding) Funding and enrollment projections suggest this pattern will hold through 2005.

Besides cutting back funds, there has been a dramatic, yet covert withdrawal of responsibility for ensuring access to education. "The primary onus is on individual Albertans," notes the government in People and prosperity: A human resource strategy for Alberta. Also mentioned are the responsibilities of employers and institutions. Notably absent is the government's share of responsibility for continuous learning and the updating of skills.

Alberta's performance-based funding mechanism (PBFM) is an important device for the Alberta government to underfund post-secondary education, and then wash its hands of the consequences. PBFM erodes institutional autonomy and offloads the responsibility for accessing post-secondary education from government to individuals. This strategy also allows the government to sidestep responsibility for declining quality that stems from budgets cuts.

How does the system work? Put simply, the PBFM system takes institutional data, compares it to benchmarks, and awards funds based on performance. The government collects data on a number of performance indicators such as employment rates of graduates, enrollment levels, graduate satisfaction levels, and revenue generated in addition to government grants and tuition. An overall institutional score is tallied and funding is awarded on a competitive basis.

 
Redefining educational quality in economic terms

The dangers of this type of system are not obvious, and the political implications must be teased out. First, Alberta's PBFM focusses on easily quantifiable economic outcomes and ignores education's social and cultural benefits. The government defends this omission by arguing that "the social and cultural outcomes, while important, have not been clearly articulated." By focussing on economic measures, the PBFM (re)defines quality as value for money.

Emphasizing economic outcomes (e.g., employment, customer satisfaction, etc.) effectively excludes traditional indicators of quality that are prerequisites for high-quality, transformative education. The declines in accessibility, quality of faculty and infrastructure that result from long-term reductions in per-student funding are ignored and the government neatly sidesteps criticism that the quality of post-secondary education has declined.

By selecting measures such as satisfaction and the employment rates of graduates as indicators of quality-indicators, the government creates data that justifies its substantial reduction of post-secondary funding.

 
Measuring excellence by dubious standards

During the announcement of the performance awards, Minister of Advanced Education and Career Development Clint Dunford explained "We believe that striving towards the goals will promote continuous improvement at individual institutions and throughout the system. Based on our results, thus far, excellent progress is being made." Impressive claims, but the lack of baseline data makes the contention of progress impossible to prove or disprove. Success is guaranteed by government selection and pretesting, since the government sets the levels of performance that are labelled as indicative of "excellence".

 
Offloading responsibility for educational quality

Measuring each institution's performance gives the institution, and not the government responsibility for the provision of high-quality education. However the ability of Alberta's colleges, universities and technical institutes to improve their performance has been dramatically constrained by 15 years of declining funding. Further, many factors outside of institutions' control (e.g., general levels of employment, graduates' activities, etc.) also affect performance.

 
Avoiding responsibility, but gaining control

By cutting $250 million per year between 1994 and 1997, the government has created a situation where institutions are desperate for cash. It then holds out a carrot in the form a $15-million annual per-formance-funding envelope. But in order for institutions to receive the remedy, they must accept the government's redefinition of quality. This is an unprecedented infringement on institutional autonomy that shifts considerable control over program objectives and delivery methods from institutions to government. Institutions must also accept the transfer of responsibility for declining education quality.

The PBFM allows the government to change both the level of performance it considers acceptable and introduce additional performance indicators. This could include the re-introduction of an indicator rewarding increasing levels of graduation (which was dropped only weeks before the final tallying of institutional scores) that would pressure institutions to graduate students regardless of performance. Pressure has already been exerted on faculty in Red Deer College's university-transfer engineering program to increase their pass rates beyond the levels recorded by the Universities of Alberta and Calgary or face the termination of their program.

This transfer of power has gone virtually unnoticed. For example, no one has raised concern that the government rewards institutions that increase enrollment despite continually declining per-student funding. The educational consequences (e.g., larger classes, fewer assignments and less instructor-student contact) are substantial, and are outcomes that most people would consider overwhelmingly negative. Ironically, this is considered an indicator of quality by the performance-based funding mechanism.

 
Redefinition of purpose in education

Offloading responsibility and redefining quality suggests that a general redefinition of purpose in education is occurring. By emphasizing the personal benefits of higher salaries and downplaying the societal benefits of a higher quality of life, the government has shifted the responsibility for obtaining education to the individual. Education is seen as a commodity to be purchased by the individual, rather than a right to be provided by society. The disavowal of government responsibility creates an environment where competition replaces cooperation as the mechanism by which education is accessed.

This approach to post-secondary education disproportionately favours those with greater personal resources. The final irony is that while access to education is limited to those with resources, the privileged also enjoy tax cuts made possible only because of dramatic declines in public expenditures.

 
Bob Barnetson is a doctoral candidate in higher education at the University of Calgary and Research and Communications Officer for the Alberta College-Institute Faculties Association. Bob can be reached at: barnetsonb@acifa.gmcc.ab.ca The full-text of this article is available for viewing at the Education Policy Analysis Archives (http://olam.ed.asu.edu/epaa/v5n22.html ).