Abstract
The paper examines the recent experience of the Ontario university system with financial retrenchment. It is noted that the policy of the Government which was in power until May 1985, was to distribute cutbacks proportionately among all universities through an enrolment based funding formula, and to resist calls from various agencies for more selective intervention in the system. It is suggested that more selective interventions may hold a certain political appeal, and the new Government's first attempt at what it calls rationalizing the university system is described.
The paper argues that “rationalization” is a very ambiguous, and often misleading, term which conceals either changes in university spending patterns or reductions in particular activities, and that such changes or reductions should be the subject of public debate. Most likely, change in the structure of the university system, by itself, will not save money, and the attempts of any government to be seen as making efficiency gains through merely rearranging relationships among universities is characterized as a shell game. Only reducing the number of institutions or programs, with corresponding reductions in numbers of staff and students, will produce significant financial savings, and that is a road down which Ontario politicians have been reluctant to travel, at least until recently. The paper concludes by suggesting that, insofar as it deems that retrenchment in the universities is fiscally necessary, Government should restrict its intervention to the realm of determining publicly affordable and appropriate levels of operating grants. Individual universities themselves should determine the most efficient ways to allocate whatever level of public funding is provided. The policy of making modest annual reductions in total real operating grants, with occasional increases when deemed possible, is probably the most prudent, if least glamorous, of available strategies for retrenchment.
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Skolnik, M.L. The shell game called system rationalization: the politics and economics of retrenchment in the Ontario university system. High Educ 16, 155–171 (1987). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00139041
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00139041