Ontario should force colleges, universities to specialize, says expert panel

Despite the Ontario government’s call for more specialization by colleges and universities — less overlap, more differences between them — schools have failed to come up with enough ways to differentiate themselves and government must start to do it for them, a blue-chip panel has concluded.

The report by a 10-member expert panel calls on Queen’s Park to take an “urgent … active” top-down approach to colleges and universities by deciding which special areas it believes are important — maybe certain ways of teaching, fields of research, types of credentials offered — and making institutions compete for those limited dollars.

“With the peanut butter approach to funding, you spread the money everywhere but never have enough money to do everything at a high level. And there is a sense in Ontario that quality is going down,” warned Harvey Weingarten, president of the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO), Ontario’s arm’s-length advisory group on high learning, which set up the expert panel.

But if institutions won’t suggest their own areas of strength (and by default, areas where they aren’t strong), government must choose priorities and have schools compete for funding in those areas to ensure dwindling dollars are well spent, said Weingarten.

“Instead of putting money on the table for certain things and everyone gets their fair share,” Weingarten suggested Queen’s Park decide on its goals — more focus on undergraduate education perhaps, or more graduate research in a particular field — and let institutions compete “to see who does it best.”

A third party could measure how well a school meets its target and tie funding to those “outcomes,” he said. “In the absence of change, the quality of the student experience in Ontario will continue to diminish.”

The Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities asked HEQCO last fall to create the panel of 10 educators after asking each of the province’s 20 universities and 24 community colleges to choose their own areas of strength.

The panel, which included several college and university presidents, was asked to review these and then recommend five institutions to take the lead in particular fields with the help of a $30-million “transformation fund.”

However, the proposals proved too similar to each other and in some cases too unrealistic for the panel to choose any lead institutions, noted the report.

The panel did suggest Queen’s Park use the $30 million to boost province-wide online learning, and Weingarten suggested the province use it as a financial carrot for which colleges and universities and even the private sector could compete for the right to create a new online system.

Ministry spokeswoman Emily Hedges said the report’s main findings and recommendations “are consistent with the government’s transformation agenda and will help us engage with universities and colleges in the next steps of developing and establishing a strategic mandate agreement with each institution (over the next year).”

Original Article
Source: thestar.com
Author: Louise Brown