Alberta clings to ‘deformance’ funding model

COVID-19 offers chance to rethink university budgets, Marc Spooner says.

The COVID -19 pandemic has certainly exposed the folly of performance-based funding schemes for post-secondary institutions as announced by both Alberta and Ontario governments.

In both the Alberta and Ontario cases, there has been a strong call for a significant proportion of the funding to be tied to performance on a narrow set of indicators, many linked to labour-market and economic outcomes: for example, indicators such as “graduate employment rate;” “employment in a related field;” “time to find employment;” and “graduate median income.”

Given that universities do not control the labour market, Ontario has made the responsible and commendable decision to not judge their performance against a set of metrics over which they have little control — a fact that the COVID -19 crisis has made abundantly clear.

So, for the time being, Ontario has rightly pressed pause on its performancebased funding plans, though, for now, Alberta is stubbornly hanging on.

Dogmatic defenders of performance-based funding systems will invariably revert to “what about-ism” by repeating the accountability mantra and mentioning a few of the more reasonably conceived indicators such as “percentage of Indigenous students” and “Work integrated learning” — certainly important measures — but the reality is, universities are already gathering and responding to such data. In fact, to leave the impression that universities are currently unaccountable is not only misleading, but flat out untrue and conveniently elides existing accountability measures such as external program reviews, student teaching evaluations, professional accreditation bodies, and strict financial audits.

The truth is, universities actually spend a great deal of resources gathering and responding to data to better serve, attract, and retain students, and ultimately, better serve society. Students are, after all, increasingly the university’s primary funder, shouldering a greater percentage of the financial burden, as provincial funding has successively been eroded.

Ironically, imposing performance-based funding systems will invariably lead to the addition of another layer of bureaucracy at both post-secondary institution and ministry levels. There will, with little doubt, be new or reclassified university management positions whose sole purpose will be to assess, report, target, and ultimately game the new metrics. On the government side, bureaucrats will be needed to gather, evaluate, surveil, and, in the longer term, respond to the manipulated metrics as well as to their unintended consequences.

For a pithy example of the distortions that happen when coercive metrics are imposed, one need only glance at the U.K. where various versions of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) have unintentionally led to the de-emphasis of teaching. In an attempt to counter this particular side-effect caused by the REF, the government responded by creating the Teaching Excellence Framework in an ever-expanding set of precipitous choices made by politicians caught up in the unwieldy spiral of dealing with the consequences of metrics and their unintended outcomes by adding even more of them.

It is no surprise that this has led to bureaucratic bloat, while diverting larger and larger pieces of the pie away from teaching, research, and service — the very budget line items that actually serve students and society.

Hopefully, we can benefit from the second sight the COVID -19 crisis has afforded us, and permanently shelve, not pause, these misguided performance-based funding plans. It should not escape us to see that these schemes could be more appropriately viewed as “deformance” funding since they financially bully the university further away from its aspirational ideals.

Under these funding conditions the university moves from being an institution dedicated to fostering critical, creative, and engaged citizens, while generating public-interest research, towards a newly conceived narrow mission to become mostly an entrepreneurial training centre churning out atomized workers while performing short-sighted corporate-styled and -directed research and development.

For all our sake, let’s not let that happen on our watch.