the briefing room

At a conference Tuesday on the Ontario government’s plan to build 3 new undergraduate campuses, Academic Reform co-author Ian Clark argued that undergraduate universities that focus solely on teaching would create cosier classes, reduce salary costs, and boost student satisfaction. Moreover, Clark says professors at these new institutions should be required to teach twice as many courses as usual — a full 80% of their time with the remainder left for research and administration. Doing so would cut the operating cost of educating a student from $14,300 to $9,800 at a campus of 10,000. Clark noted. Not everyone agrees the province needs any new campus at all. A York University economics professor called it a “major mistake to expand Ontario’s university system now…we already have the system we need in place.” The professor concludes the province already pays for PSE for over 75% of the population — beyond even the government’s own target of 70%. He suggested Ontario should instead bolster graduate education and research — the opposite of what the authors of Academic Reform recommend. “We can debate what the new universities might look like, but unless I’m reading different newspapers than everyone else, there’s no money to do this or really anything,” said Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario president Harvey Weingarten at the conference. Toronto Star (Academicagroup)

A new book argues for substantial reform to Ontario’s higher-education system, including the introduction of a rare breed of institution in Canada: the teaching-oriented university.

“By several measures, Ontario currently has a good higher education system,” say Ian Clark, David Trick and Richard Van Loon in their new book, Academic Reform: Policy Options for Improving the Quality and Cost-Effectiveness of Undergraduate Education in Ontario. The authors likely did not mean, with that particular declaration, to damn with faint praise, although they do foresee serious trouble ahead. “There is now,” they write, “sufficient evidence about worrisome trends in the quality of learning and in the cost-effectiveness of the undergraduate teaching model in Ontario to warrant substantial reform.”

The book, a sequel to Academic Transformation: The Forces Reshaping Higher Education in Ontario (published in 2009), sets out the contours of the reform that the authors see as necessary. It was generating buzz within academic circles even before its official launch and will no doubt prove to be controversial. Aiming their book at policy makers, the authors state firmly that “this is a policy problem – requiring comprehensive action by the government – and not just a pedagogical challenge to be addressed within the academy.” Because many of the province’s higher education challenges are shared by other jurisdictions in North America and other OECD countries, much of their analysis, they say, also should be relevant to higher education policy outside Ontario… Read More