Category Archives: Ontario

January Newsletter — Message from the Dean

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Message from the Dean
Happy New Year to everyone in the Faculty. I anticipate that this will be an unusually busy term. In the next few months, we will be working on the budget, strategic enrollment planning, and prioritization. As well, the University has submitted a revised Strategic Mandate Agreement document to the Province, so negotiations will commence shortly with Dr. Paul C. Genest is the Deputy Minister Responsible for Francophone Affairs and Special Advisor: Strategic Mandate Agreements (Universities). Lastly, another iteration of our proposed strategic plan will be presented for discussion shortly.
I encourage faculty to participate in the working groups that will be struck to facilitate the prioritization and the strategic enrollment planning exercises. Both processes are being led by Higher Education Strategy Associates (HESA), and are funded by our successful Prioritization and Innovation Fund application. Many of you will have already met Alex Usher, the president of HESA, on one of his visits to campus. You should anticipate meeting him and his colleagues, as faculty will be consulted broadly at various stages in these enterprises.
For those of you unfamiliar with prioritization and strategic enrollment planning, let me briefly describe them. Prioritization is an exercise that allows us to examine how effectively we deliver programs. By looking at a number of metrics under the rubrics of efficiency, relevance, quality and opportunity, the university will be in a position to determine where resources should be deployed to assure the soundness of its program offerings (value for investment). The prioritization exercise itself, as it is constructed here at Nipissing University in 2014, will involve the development of a methodology that works well for us, so that it can be used routinely to review all programs. In this year, we will only have time and resources to review a subset of all programs with the assistance of HESA.
Strategic enrollment planning is a different exercise; it allows us to be forward looking rather than rooted in the historical constraints of what programs have done to date. Strategic enrollment planning mines data about future trends in scholarship, job creation, workforce analysis in order to allow us to project where best we can grow our programming to respond to future needs. In this exercise, we will note how our areas of strength correspond to and reflect future trends.
The membership of the PPC committee of Senate has been asked to sit as an ad hoc committee which will be interacting directly with HESA. If you have questions about the process, I am happy to speak with you about it and/or to take questions that arise up with HESA or Dr. Harley D’Entremont, VP Academic and Research.
Unrelatedly, the three deans met with Dr. Michael Hawes of Fulbright Canada and Scott Walker of the U.S. Consulate on 9 January 2014. The purpose of the meeting was to talk about opportunities for both faculty and students within the Fulbright suite of programs. I encourage you to review the programs now offered by Fulbright which include faculty exchanges to the U.S. in all scholarly areas, community development projects, GAP year (configured as the year between 4th year and graduate studies) projects. Fulbright Canada is sponsoring much much more than public policy exchanges which was their mandate a decade ago.

 

Prioritization Process — Strategic Planning

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Robert Dickeson’s Prioriziting Academic Programs and Services (2010) is being touted by the Provincial Government as a useful manual to direct conversations about strategic planning.  Essentially the process involves collecting a great deal of data about the university enterprise and use that data to drive informed decisions about allocation of resources.

The key to a successful prioritization exercise will be that it be transparent and collaborative, that the goals be clear (it is not a slashing and burning exercise, rather it is knowledge gathering exercise which will allow everyone involved in decision making to make reasoned decisions about program growth, maintenance and reductions), and that the process be sufficiently robust that it can be used reliably over many cycles.

 

Differentiation, Heather Mallick’s Column from Friday 20 September 2013

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Differentiation remains a topic of conversation in the sector.  While it is true that differentiation by some definitions already exists–by admission average, by region, by the emphasis placed on teaching and research, by size and resources–it is also the case that all students in Ontario can be assured of the quality of their programs.  Not all universities offer the same programs, but what is offered is comparable big school to small by virtue of the IQAP process.

If we follow the presumed path that will leave us with three tiers in Ontario (U of T; U15; the rest), I’m not sure what problem has been solved, esp. if the tiers are entrenched such that universities can’t be re-seeded. Are we opposed to competition (have we given up on capitalism and evolution)?

If the conversation is about the delivery of undergraduate education, then students need to receive sufficient preparation for second degrees (professional schools, graduate schools, college programs, apprenticeships), so we are potentially undertaking a process that we return us to the current state.

I have many questions, one is, Where are the U15 graduates going, esp if they want to pursue a life in academia? Ontario has in some way subsidized their education.  Presumably the best academicians blend current research with teaching.  If ‘the rest’ is defined as teaching only, then there will be no faculty–graduates will pursue careers in the US or in other provinces.  Why is that better? Or is that the endgame?

In Heather Mallick’s column, she highlights some of the concerns that are fuelling the discussion:  the cost of education delivered in “traditional” ways; the presumed savings of MOOCs; the difficulty of transferring between institutions (colleges and universities); the unpreparedness of students (entering university and, in some cases, upon graduation).  While I agree that these are the recurring themes, most of these themes will not be addressed by differentiation.

http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2013/09/20/ontario_universities_are_being_reined_in_mallick.html#

HEQCO | Differentiation: Toward a more coherent and sustainable university system

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The following is from HEQCO:
A new report from the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) finds that the province’s 20 universities could be organized into at least three distinct clusters based on a set of variables that other jurisdictions have used to differentiate their university systems, setting the stage for a more coherent, diversified and sustainable system.  But for this differentiation framework to be effective, the roles, rights and responsibilities of universities in each of the clusters needs to be identified and the  government would need to align those decisions to funding.

 

“These conversations and decisions are meaningful, worthwhile and effective only if they are tied to funding formulas, which represents the most powerful levers available to government to effect change,” says HEQCO. “As individual institutions consider how these decisions intersect with their plans and aspirations, these debates are typically controversial, but they are critical if the benefits of a more differentiated Ontario university system are to be derived and enjoyed by students, the public and the province.”

 

Project description

Previous HEQCO reports, especially a report from an expert panel that assessed the strategic mandate agreement submissions of Ontario universities, laid out the arguments for and benefits of a more differentiated Ontario postsecondary system.  The government has indicated that it wishes to pursue a policy of greater institutional differentiation.  This report examines the diversity of Ontario’s universities (a college analysis is forthcoming) on variables that other jurisdictions have used to differentiate the universities within their systems.  For this study, the report considers data on enrolment, number of PhDs awarded, percentage of doctoral degrees awarded, sponsored research income, faculty publications, research citations and H-index scores, which factor in both the number of research publications by faculty member and frequency of citation.

 

Findings

The data suggest that the University of Toronto could be considered to be in a cluster of its own, competitive with some of the world’s most highly ranked universities.  At the upper end of research intensity are the other five Ontario universities in the so-called U-15, representing Canada’s most research-intensive universities: McMaster, Western, Ottawa, Waterloo and Queen’s, as well as the University of Guelph.

 

Within a cluster of mainly undergraduate universities in the Ontario system are Algoma, Ontario College of Art and Design University (OCADU), Nipissing, University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT), Laurier, Trent, Brock, Lakehead and Laurentian.  These institutions are less involved in graduate education, especially at the PhD level and attract a lower level of research income.  Two of the institutions – UOIT and OCADU — have highly defined mandates. In such cases, other jurisdictions sometimes include a category of “special purpose universities” in their differentiation frameworks.

 

The report notes that four universities – York, Carleton, Windsor and Ryerson – fall between the more research intensive and mainly undergraduate clusters.

 

Although used in other jurisdictions, there are two other common dimensions of differentiation that are absent in the Ontario system.  No Ontario university presents itself as primarily undergraduate liberal arts nor as an online or “open” university. Virtually all of Ontario’s universities characterize themselves, and aspire to be, research intensive. And although there has been discussion about online institutions for some years, none promote internet-based instruction to the degree and breadth of acknowledged online institutions. “While Ontario universities differ in size, research profile and participation in graduate studies,” according to the report, “all of them, regardless of the details of their current state and makeup, appear to aspire to the same goal: specifically, to grow discovery research programs and expand graduate studies.”

 

Policy considerations

With the implementation of a differentiation framework, universities use their own resources more purposefully and students have clear choices about which institutions best serve their personal and professional goals.  “This is how the quality of the overall system is uplifted and it is what the best differentiation frameworks enable.   The role of data is to provide the hard facts about the current activities of Ontario’s universities to inform the development of a sensible differentiation framework,” says HEQCO.

 

The authors note that the proposed differentiation scheme poses questions for government. Among them, should the four universities that do not readily align with the “more research intensive” and “mainly undergraduate” clusters be placed in a separate category? Should PhD seats be preferentially allocated to the more research intensive universities and to what degree?  Should government attempt to minimize PhD programs in mainly undergraduate universities?  How should the funding of master’s programs, especially professional and course-based master’s programs, be allocated across the clusters?

 

While a differentiation framework defines differences among institutions, it does not signal differing merit, value or worth, say the authors.  And rather than concentrating on what a university should not do, a useful framework enables institutions to do even more of what they do best.

 

Authors of The Diversity of Ontario’s Universities: A Data Set to Inform the Differentiation Discussion are Harvey P. Weingarten, Martin Hicks, Linda Jonker and Shuping Liu, Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario.

 

For more information visit: http://www.heqco.ca/en-CA/Research/Research%20Publications/Pages/Summary.aspx?link=108

 

Ainsley Matthews

Events and Publications Coordinator | Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario – Informing the future of higher education | 1 Yonge Street, Suite 2402, Toronto, ON M5E 1E5 | T: 416-212-5248   M: 416-799-2760
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