Universities have a world of challenges to face, AUCC chief says

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Higher education is launching into a new era of mass participation around the world, and Stephen J. Toope has the crucial task of rallying Canada's universities to navigate the shifting landscape.

The second-term president of the University of British Columbia is the new chair of the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, a group of 95 independent and fiercely competitive institutions trying to manage massive (and welcome) expansion at a time of government restraint. How to adapt is still a matter of debate, but a changing labour market is demanding flexible graduates with ever more advanced skills, making universities' role in the country's future as important as ever.

Dr. Toope wants universities working together to tackle their profound challenges: how to open up to more private-sector partnerships, divide up resources as costs rise faster than revenues, and stay ahead of escalating competition from other countries.

He is hopeful, as was evident in his speech to the AUCC's 100th annual meeting in Montreal on Wednesday, which stressed that universities can open up new worlds of knowledge, enhancing health and prosperity in all corners of society.

To deliver on that optimism, however, Dr. Toope said in an interview that universities need to wrangle three major obstacles.

The funding squeeze

The "cloud on the horizon" is still the annual budget crunch. Funding from the provinces has generally stayed flat, hardly keeping pace with enrolment growth, while tuition fee hikes have been constrained – if not as much as students might like. Meanwhile, institutional costs are rising faster than inflation.

"We're actually spending less per student than we were 20 years ago. Considerably less," Dr. Toope said.

At the same time, universities are expected to find the dollars to do more engaging teaching, and to provide "enriched opportunities" such as undergraduate research, co-operative programs and study-abroad options.

"Improvement is going to require collaboration: it isn't pointing fingers and saying, 'the government's not doing enough,' " Dr. Toope said.

That may mean turning to technology to feed students basic information, freeing resources and class time for more problem solving and critical debate.

Revamping undergraduate experiences

Dr. Toope wants to be blunt: he's "very tired of generalized assertions that no one cares about undergraduate education."

He contends there is ample evidence to the contrary, including his own multimillion-dollar efforts and those at the University of Toronto to offer smaller first-year cohorts and more engaging teaching techniques.

Still, he agrees a need remains to improve the lot of undergrads, squeezed by the pressure on schools to land research funding and perform in research-focused university rankings.

"I would say there's a very strong sense that we understand that our mission is threefold [teaching, research and community engagement] that we do have to understand that we don't exist without students," he said.

Dr. Toope thinks a rebalancing is happening, but that the equilibrium has to be system-wide, and will still vary between universities. A student at a large school like UBC enjoys "an incredible range of opportunity," but may "be expected to do more on his or her own" than at a smaller undergraduate-focused institution, he said.

The global footrace

Canada has taken substantial steps to establish its higher education system internationally, from major federal research investments such as the $10-million Canada Excellence Research Chairs to recent efforts at marketing Canadian education abroad more forcefully.

But even as Canada's investments helped university enrolment top one million for the first time this year, Dr. Toope points out that China recently added one million people to its enrolment totals in a single year, and other emerging powerhouse economies like India and Brazil are spending heavily on postsecondary education.

"We've done a good job, but other people are as positive, or more positive," Dr. Toope said.

The country's universities have worked "incredibly hard" to develop international partnerships and connections, yet the goal posts keep moving. Now, a growing movement to find more sophisticated ways of measuring graduates' abilities and outcomes could provide a new set of yardsticks.

"Will Canada be seen as an integral node in that international network of knowledge creation? I think we're going to be able to assess that, and we'd better," he said. "If we're not, we're going to fail Canada, so we can't afford to not make those connections strong."