Where Canada lies in Global Trends with Alex Usher

In this episode of the World of Higher Education podcast, Alex Usher discusses global trends and challenges in higher education funding. He outlines systemic issues like slow economic growth, price volatility, and skepticism about the value of higher education, examining how these factors affect countries worldwide. The discussion includes specific insights into the Canadian higher education system, the impact of international students, and the trend towards vocational education. Tune in to understand how global pressures and local policies shape the higher education landscape.

👉 Episode Links:
3.1: Higher Education in a Polarized World with Simon Marginson: https://youtu.be/N5y1v_PuGaI
3.3: What a Second Trump Presidency Could Mean for US Higher Education with Brendan Cantwell: https://youtu.be/gOzDoHwobOo
3.6: Dutch Higher Education at a Crossroads with Marijk van der Wende: https://youtu.be/lFHFExCIX5M
2.23: Higher Education in Russia: https://worlded.transistor.fm/episodes/2-23-higher-education-in-russia
🗓️ AI-CADEMY: Canada Summit for Post-Secondary Education: https://site.pheedloop.com/event/HESAaicademy/home

Creators & Guests

Host

Alex Usher

He/Him. President, Higher Education Strategy Associates

Producer

Samantha Pufek

She/Her. Graphic Designer, Higher Education Strategy Associates

Producer

Tiffany MacLennan

She/Her. Research Associate, Higher Education Strategy Associates

What is The World of Higher Education?

The World of Higher Education is dedicated to exploring developments in higher education from a global perspective. Join host, Alex Usher of Higher Education Strategy Associates, as he speaks with new guests each week from different countries discussing developments in their regions.

Produced by Tiffany MacLennan and Samantha Pufek.

Sam Pufek:  You are listening to the world of higher education podcast. Season three episode 15.
Tiffany MacLennan: Happy New Year and welcome back to the World of Higher Education podcast. I'm Tiffany McLennan, your host for the day, which means that your guest is the one and only Alex Usher. In this episode, we'll explore key global trends in higher education and then dive into how Canada fits or doesn't fit within them. From widespread funding challenges to the politicization of universities and the evolving focus on vocational education, we'll unpack how these issues play out on a global scale and what they mean for the Canadian post secondary education sector. Let's hear from Alex.
Alex, many of our guests this year discussed how their higher education systems are grappling with significant funding challenges. Can you tell me what some of the issues have been globally? Have there been any places who haven't been struggling financially?
Alex Usher: So, look, I think in the developed world, you've got very similar issues around slow growth and price volatility and an aging demographic and frankly, an increasing skepticism about how higher education translates into growth. And so what you've seen everywhere, I think, is a weakening in the desire— certainly it's a reversal of where we were, say, 20 years ago. 20 years ago when global rankings started, everyone was like, 'Oh yeah, ranking, you know, we got to be higher in the rankings. And I, and part of that was a genital waving kind of petition, but it also reflected a view that countries really believe that investments in knowledge pay dividends that rankings meant something that meant if I had more top universities, I would have likely to be a top economy. I just don't think that's there anymore. Like, I just don't think anyone believes that anymore. Until people believe that you know, you're going to have difficulties in getting public funding. You can still get private funding. You could go for higher tuition fees. You could go for, you could get money that way. And in some places that still works. It still works in China. But I would say a lot of people are now, I would argue, are fairly skeptical about, you know, in Europe where they've, they have higher taxes and that kind of stuff, they sort of feel I shouldn't have to pay tuition fees because I gave it the office. That hasn't changed in most of Europe. And I would say in North America, Australia, the UK, people are saying, 'Actually, we're not sure we're getting value for money'. So the combination of those two, I think have put people, you know, put higher education in a bit of a difficult situation, which is basically, universities and academics know what kind of product they would like to give the public but nobody wants to pay for it, right.? So we're always like, I think in every country that I look at, we're probably 10, 15%. There's a gap between what academics want to provide and what the public is willing to pay either privately or publicly. So, just that issue, nobody wants to pay for it.
And, that's pretty universal. Not everywhere. Not everywhere. I would say there's places like India and Turkey, I think we've seen very big recent increases, but they're rare.
Tiffany MacLennan: Yeah, absolutely. And how do these funding challenges manifest in the Canadian higher education system? Are there any unique factors at play here or are we following the global trend?
Alex Usher: Well, when it comes to public funding, I think we're following the global trend. I don't think there's very, you know, there's not a lot different, I would say. Maybe we've defunded institutions a little bit more than some other countries, but mainly that's because we thought we'd found a way around the whole thing, right? We thought we'd found international students and we could get them to pay for it. It's like, I always like to say, you, you know, uh, public funding of public education is a public good. And foreign funding of public education is a public great. That's just fantastic if you can get other people's middle classes to pay for the, subsidize your middle classes education, I mean, why, who would not do that?
And that's what Canada did, right? We thought marketization would save us and marketization in our case was largely a phenomenon of internationalization. And it did for a while, right? Like we could ignore all these problems so that every time government said, yeah, we're not going to invest this year, institutions said, that's fine, we'll get another 10, 000 international students. And we did that for a decade basically. And until we couldn't anymore. And we weren't alone in that, I think, you know, uh, you see the UK, you see Australia and to an extent, some other countries, the Netherlands ended up with the same kind of dependency on international students.
And in all cases decades of nimbyism and the inability to build housing through eventually threw up a block against all of them. So, in all these countries, you saw very rapid rises in prices in housing. And sometimes that was ascribed to international students, sometimes more fairly than others, right? But I think, you know, we've seen Canada the last two months first time we've seen a decrease in housing, in, in rental prices in, in many, many years. And that's largely because our federal government decided to shut down international immigration to, to, they really reduced the number of students who are coming into the country. And so, yeah, we thought we could get away with it for a while. Anglophone countries thought they could get away from it while, but you can't really. You know, if the public doesn't want to pay for it, eventually that's going to show up in it's going to hurt the institutions eventually.
Tiffany MacLennan: One of our past guests, Simon Marginson, has talked pretty extensively about the growing polarization in higher education around the world, and we heard about this polarization in higher education. In places like the U. S., with the Trump administration coming in, with Brendan Cantwell joining our podcast, we've heard about it in Russia, and there are multiple more of our episodes. Can you summarize, kind of, what this polarization means and how it's playing out in different parts of the world?
Alex Usher: I'm not convinced, well, I'm not convinced polarization is the right way to think about it. What you are seeing is an increased politicization of a public good. Everyone sort of said, yeah, we should publicly fund higher education, so that, responsive to the public. Well, okay. If the public goes bananas and starts, electing fascists higher education is going to go the same way because that's, it's, again, that's not polarization, I mean, there's a political polarization behind it, I suppose, but the actual acts that we're seeing is an increasing state control over higher education, regardless of whether the, they're actually funding it, right? I mean, this is the great thing in places like Canada or the US, which is that in fact, the government doesn't really fund post secondary education to any great extent. And yet they are exerting a larger and larger legal influence over things. And, and so, yeah, so autocrats and autocrats have always done this, right? Like, it's no, you know, China hasn't been polarized. Russia hasn't been polarized, but Putin's been there for 25 years, he's just choosing to exert greater state control. And I think it's because there was a line for a while that higher education would open these countries up. Right? Like we say, 'Oh yeah let's do more higher education, provide more higher education in China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, because that'll make them more democratic'. Never happened. Never happened. Right? Like, so I think people believe there was a saving prospect of higher education, but what it ended up doing was it said to autocrats or would be autocrats that they realized that some people in higher education had an agenda, which was about, frankly, state capture, which is about let's use higher education to affect political change. Guess what? They're shutting that down. I mean, I think and I think you're seeing that almost everywhere. I can't think of anywhere where you, I mean, I think increasingly governments are less democratic. Politics is, you know, happens on such a short time scale these days that you don't have time to do democratic things. So it's about governments ordering institutions to do things. And we've seen that lots of provincial governments here in Canada do that. So it's about do as I say. Rather than, hey, let's have a process to make things wonderful and everything else. And yeah governments of left and right are doing that. And, you know, I mean, we have Alma Maldonado on next week, and she's going to talk to us a lot about how a left wing populist government does that. So it's not a right wing, left wing thing, necessarily. But, I, there are very few places I can think of that are escaping this kind of thing at the moment.
Tiffany MacLennan: You talked about Canada in parts of that. Do you see Canada being more insulated from the politicization? Are we seeing divides within our own higher education system? And how do you think, it's January 6th right now, as of about 4 hours ago, the Liberal Party leader stepped down. We're gonna go into an election! What do you think this means for what the next handful of years looks like for higher education in Canada?
Alex Usher: So we're not insulated from it. I mean, Canada is subject to the same kinds of things. I think the kinds of pressures that we've seen have been fairly attenuated. I mean, the government of Ontario, for instance, six years ago now made a really big deal about, we're going to have free speech principles in our universities. And, the upshot of it is, is that the higher education quality council of Ontario writes a two page report every year. And nothing happens but, but everybody, but, you know, conservatives are happy because they did something and they showed those liberal jerks where to get off and that's fine, right? Like, there's a certain level at which you can keep doing the same thing, the, the right is satisfied with a certain level of performativity. I mean, in Canada, where I think you're seeing it right now, Alberta, there's the whole issue about EDI programs, equity, diversity, inclusion programs being shut down and both Calgary and Alberta have you know, started, you know, they've downgraded the EDI portfolio and they start talking about access community and inclusion. Okay. So now we've got different letters of the alphabet. It's not clear to me that they're actually doing anything all that different. Clearly, EDI has got some some people very upset but, you know, it's worth it to be an inclusive employer. Universities know that, boards know that, right? So they're not going to, they're not going to stop doing a lot of that stuff. And anyway, I don't think that, so, so part of what's going on is you, you have to give some symbolic victories to conservative governments that are wound up about certain things in universities, but they still want their kids to go there. Right? I mean, so I think this is the other thing, right? Is I think in most of the world still, even where you have conservative governments that are upset about universities, it's not because they don't want their kids to go there. The one exception is the United States, right? So you are seeing a real change in the desire of young children of Republicans to go to universities, both male and female. That's quite different from what we're seeing elsewhere in the world. And I don't, I don't have a strong sense of why it's different. Or how long that's likely to last. But I do think that it's different. So is Canada insulated? No, we're going to see those trends. We're going to be dealing with these culture war things. But I don't, I don't expect it to end up at the same level it is in the United States.
Tiffany MacLennan: We're going to take a short break.
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Tiffany MacLennan: And we're back. Another hot topic on the podcast over the last few months has been the shift towards the vocationalization of higher education. Especially kind of pushing towards work ready graduates. Can you explain why? What's driving this trend globally? Is it just happenstance or is there an actual global shift?
Alex Usher: Yeah. See, I'm not sure this is actually true, to be honest with you. Like, I mean, you have, we've had since, I don't know, the 1960s say, okay as, as we've moved towards, you know, from an elite system of higher education to a mass system of higher education, to a universal system of higher education it's not a luxury good anymore. So it's not the place where you sit down and you think about all the great things you can do with your life and all that kind of stuff. Lots of people, the massification of higher education has always been a company of vocationalization because lots of people don't see the point in doing it unless they can get ahead. Right? I mean, that's so, in that sense, I don't think there's anything particularly new about the pushes on vocationalization in the last 10 years, say, I mean, I know occasionally you get a lot of rhetorical volleys, particularly, but not exclusively from the left, right? Like we need more plumbers and fewer philosophy grads. I can't remember. I think it might've been Rick Scott who said that. But you don't actually see that translating into changes in how, institutions deliver programs. I mean, what does change institutional programming is a change in the way applicants choose programs, which is very different from, governments coming in and doing it.
So, I mean, I give it to you in are, are students less interested in, the humanities. Yeah, but we're still have higher humanities enrollments that we've had for like, 99 percent of world history, right? Like we're not where we were in the 1980s or 1990s, but we are still a lot of people studying humanities. So I think the vocationalization thing is overblown. I think where you're seeing it now is again, it's in those countries that used to be, have very small, so mainly in Africa somewhat in, in Latin America where you're in, you know, in Asia as well, you're seeing a lot more demand for vocational education because when people go, they want to know that what they're doing, this isn't just the upper class going anymore.
And, when you get down to middle class or, lower middle class people who want to go to post secondary, they don't want to do it just because, it's a nice time. They want something back out of it. So I would say I'm not convinced that the vocationalization that we're seeing in the last few years is anything other than a trend that's been going on for 60 years. So it's not, you know what I mean? And it's not, to me, it's not that remarkable. Let's put it that way.
Interesting. With things this year in Canada, like the changes to the immigration, student immigration and work visa programs and kind of removing some of the more, the less vocational technical things from the postgraduate work visa ability. Do you predict a shift in the higher education landscape and kind of our balance in vocational, in liberal arts balance in the next few years, or do you think that things will continue on the trend there?
So let me talk about vocational education in Canada, because I think it is the greatest thing that we do. It has been over the last 60 years, and of course, this was never planned, right? Like Canadians plan nothing in higher education. It's completely against our nature to, to plan. But we walked backwards into an amazing higher education system. We stumbled into it, which is that we have a lot of options for people who don't want to do university, for people who don't want to do the more theoretical stuff. We have a pathway into the middle class that involves a lot of vocationally oriented education leading to vocational jobs. To me, that's the secret of Canadian egalitarianism. It is the Canadian community college. And of course, these come in a variety of, forms, right? I mean, there's the polytechnics and there's the, more local community colleges and there's the Cégeps in Quebec and all that kind of, I mean, there are different types of colleges out there, but collectively they give young people a huge set of options that in lots of countries don't really exist. Right? So, and I and they're good options that lead to good jobs. And I think that's always been something great about Canada and a secret that we don't talk about enough. Now, the problem is, colleges, as with universities, nobody wants to pay for it. Like we have this great college system, but, I mean, the weirdest thing in Canadian politics right now is that, we have all these bottlenecks around building things and provincial governments don't understand that not training more people is one of the things contributing to the bottlenecks. It's wild. I mean, the Ford government literally can't walk and chew gum on this stuff, right? Like they don't have any sense of this. Where the international stuff, I mean, the international stuff doesn't change very much as far as where domestic students go. I don't think what it does do is, is that because we have had a college system that has had a path leading from it to permanent residency and therefore immigration at some point that's attracted a lot of international students and that's made colleges in some parts of the country that chose to pig out, they've made them extraordinarily rich, right? Now, most of that money has gone into building new buildings. And now we don't have students to put in them because we've changed our rules around immigration and postgraduate work visas, and we're going to lose all these students. We're going to have a problem, particularly in Ontario, in terms of keeping up the those international students were cross subsidizing some of our most expensive programs, particularly in the trades. So yeah, there's going to be a few years where it's going to be very difficult to, you know, a lot of these programs are going to close and, you know, eventually we'll come back to another equilibrium. But it's going to be a tough couple of years, particularly in Ontario, to keep up these college programs.
Universities? Look, I mean, they were never, they're not as affected by the changes in policy. The international students that came there were going to some mix of business, which is not very vocational and science and engineering, which is a little bit, engineering is more, more vocational, I would argue, science, not so much, but that's where they were going, right? It was a a broader mix on the university side. They're not going to get hit to the same degree. It's carnage in the colleges. It's bad in the universities.
Last question for you. Which of the recent trends do you think are going to stick? If they stick, what do you think the future of Canadian higher education landscape looks like?
I think they're all sticking around for a few years, to be honest with you. I mean, I don't, you know, I don't see government suddenly, seeing the light on the road to Damascus and saying, 'Gosh, we should fund post secondary more'. Like, I just, I don't think it's going to happen. We might see some changes at the margin. And it'll, but there'll be, I mean, I give you an example of Alberta, right? Alberta has an increase in its youth population of 30, 40 percent over the next 10 years. Is the governor of Alberta investing in capacity to see that? I mean, this is the most predictable thing in the world. Demographics are fantastic. You can see tidal waves of students coming at you a mile away. And Alberta won't do anything. And it's not cause they won't see it. It's cause they don't want to spend money. It's just wild to me that they're, that this is just not on the policy agenda. So, and to the extent it is, I think governments in Canada... Okay, here's one way Canada is different. I think I've argued mostly that Canada is the same as everybody else. Here's one way Canada is different. We have become so unbelievably stupid around the issue of skills that it's hard to credit, like, like the PIAAC data came out a few weeks ago and, nothing. Zero. Why? Because PIAAC is about transversal skills. 20 years ago, Canadian governments could talk, they would look at that and go, 'Gosh, what are the skills our young people need to go to survive in the world'? And now they look at PIAAC and they're like, I don't know. What does this mean?' Right? If you say the word skills to a Canadian government nowadays, they can only think skilled trades and health care. Right? They're actually thinking about occupationally related skills. The idea that we could get better at transversal skills, things that matter for everybody, like the whole of the economy, not just that 20 percent in health and skill trades, it's just disappeared from the landscape. Like, it's wild. So I, like, I think our policy community in higher education has been lobotomized over the last 20 years. And that's the real problem, which is going to stop us from thinking about this stuff is that we're not focusing on big issues. So, now that's okay because, sometimes institutions thrive when government is too lazy to regulate, right? There, there can be room for institutions to sort of, you know, thrive. I kind of hope that's what will happen. I think we'll see a lot of innovation in teaching I think around AI, I think we will see a little bit more on micro credentials, maybe not as much people think, but more than I thought was likely about two years ago, that we'll start to see different types of education. I think we're going to end up with much shorter university programs. That'll take a decade or so to come through, but I think the increasing labour shortage in the economy means that institutions can't just hold students for four years anymore. They've got to bring it down to three probably. So we'll go back to three year degrees the way we had them in the 1990s, 1980s. I mean, I think those are the trends that I'm looking at. They are going to be about being more labour market focused, more skills focused, or vocationalized if you want to call it that, but students are going to love it, right? Like the idea that institutions are actually paying attention to, their time. That's going to be new, right? Cause I don't, don't think university has been very respectful of students time over the last couple of decades. That'll be new. I think students will like it. But you know, I think the institution is going to have to get a lot smarter about money. There will be a lot more work on being cost effective and not just rich, right? I think the goal of most institutions just been, hey let's get as much money so we can throw money at things. That's what I call the revenue side solution. We just don't have revenue side solutions anymore. So the solution is going to be a cost side. It's going to be a very different kind of university system. The kinds of people that you need to run university will be quite different. And that I think is going to be the case for minimum five, maybe 10 years.
Tiffany MacLennan: Alex, thanks for joining us as a guest this week.
Join us next week when Alex is your host again. And Alma Maldonado will be your guest as she'll be back to give us an update on the Mexican higher education system. We'll see you then.