Passing the Buck on Post- Secondary Education in
Alberta
by Bob Barnetson
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.
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