Originally published on January 1, 2025.
Higher education in Alberta is in a tight spot, anticipating exponential growth in enrolment after years of some of the steepest cuts the sector has ever endured.
Marc Spooner, a University of Regina professor who studies how government policy affects the corporatization of education, says that current funding models and policies have become troublesome for universities.
“Universities have become inconvenient to governments who want to carry out an agenda not based on the best available evidence for any given policy decision,” Spooner says.
According to Spooner, there is a suspicion and sometimes even hostility towards research, expertise, and perhaps even motivation to silence vocal and well-informed critics of recent policy. This suspicion, along with motivations for leaner government spending and job-focused education, has led to a series of inquiries, cuts, and policies that have formed, and are continuing to form, a post-secondary system with a partisan, ideological vision.
For this story, we spoke to experts and stakeholders from Albertan universities. We looked at government policies, data from the university’s annual reports, provincial data, and reports from industry watchers.
Micromanagement from the province has suffocated the sector, especially universities, which have been left gasping for air as higher education has to find funding and room for what a Higher Education Strategy Associates report called “bar none — the biggest youth population explosion in the past 50 years.”
Disproportionate distress
Since the UCP government began cutting funding in 2019, no school has been hit harder than the U of A, the top university in the province.
“In our perspective, the cuts have dealt a blow and continue to threaten what we see as a world-class education that we can provide to students here,” says Gordon Swaters, president of the Association of Academic Staff University of Alberta (AASUA). “There hasn’t been a part of the academy, frankly, that hasn’t been affected.”
Swaters explains that sometimes when staff leave, positions aren’t filled and that hundreds of non-academic staff were lost in the wake of restructurings after cuts. In the latest cost-cutting measure, sessional instructors are being moved out of private offices and into communal spaces, which Swaters says is a major issue for student privacy.
Students are feeling the pressure, too. As government spending on post-secondary goes down, tuition goes up to cover the gaps.
Yasmine Rais, a PhD student at the University of Alberta, says the consequences of these funding cuts are deeply personal. “Tuition fees are increasing year after year, making it harder for many of us to focus on our studies without financial stress.”
MacEwan University and the University of Alberta have been top choices for local high school graduates shooting for bachelor’s degrees.
“Our government is committed to ensuring that post-secondary education is accessible and affordable for those who wish to pursue it. That is why we capped domestic tuition increases at 2%,” says Varun Chandrasekhar, press secretary for Advanced Education in an email.
These two schools are similar in some ways and differ in others, but they have historically been funded and cut in similar strides over the years.
“Universities have become inconvenient to governments who want to carry out an agenda not based on the best available evidence for any given policy decision,”
Marc Spooner, professor at University of Regina
However, the U of A experienced a dramatic decline in provincial grants from $958 million in 2015-16 to $721 million in 2023-24. That represents almost a 25 per cent drop over nine years. It accounts for almost half of the total money cut from the entire sector.
On the other hand, MacEwan has endured relatively fewer cuts.
From 2015-16 to 2023-24, grants for MacEwan were down slightly from $117 million (having peaked around $128 Million in 2018) but are back up to $119 million in 2024.
In terms of percentages, 44 per cent of MacEwan’s 2024 budget came from the government. At the U of A, that number was 37 per cent.
The difference raises questions about the government’s funding priorities and what is seen to be the value of research-intensive institutions relative to more job-focused universities.
Across the river, things are leaner than before, and tuition is more expensive. In faculties where there is cutting at most universities, such as fine arts, MacEwan is seeing growth.
Growth in MacEwan faculties that other schools are cutting is something Allan Gilliland, former dean of MacEwan’s Faculty of Fine Arts and Communications, doesn’t quite understand.
During his time in leadership from 2017 to 2023, higher education in Alberta schools went from larger operating grants and a tuition freeze under the NDP to larger tuition hikes and steep cuts to operating grants under the UCP government. There was also added stress from the COVID-19 pandemic and a period of rapid inflation.
Gilliland says fine arts are always the first to go. He saw this firsthand when he would regularly meet with other leaders at the Canadian Association of Fine Arts Deans (CFAD).
“All their programs are cutting. Every time they lost a faculty member, often that position got sucked up and didn’t get replaced,” Gilliland says.
Gilliand says at the University of Saskatchewan, the fine arts used to have a chair for each department, such as music and theatre. Now, it’s all consolidated under just one chair. Laurentian University and Vancouver Island University cut their music programs entirely, and the U of A struggles to keep its equipment and facilities up to date.
MacEwan’s fine arts, however, has seen nothing but growth and investment. Along with a $175 million new building and state-of-the-art facilities, Gilliland hired 42 faculty members during his leadership.
“The provost just said another 50 new hires; out of that, we’ll probably get, I don’t know, 5, 6, 7 of those?” Gilliland says. “That’s unheard of anywhere else.”
When asked how MacEwan could do this, where other schools couldn’t, he didn’t know for sure but theorized that MacEwan’s humble roots helped keep things tight and balance the budget.
Fund-razing
Since taking charge in 2019, the UCP government has taken a heavy-handed approach to Alberta’s post-secondary sector, retracting 31 per cent of its government funding over five years.
Lee Easton, the president of the Confederation of Alberta Faculty Associations, calls what’s happening in Alberta a domestication of post-secondary education and research.
“Like your pet, right? It lives nicely in the house and you know if you pet it, it wags its tail and purrs. If you don’t like what it does, you can discipline it.”
The rationale of the day came from two previous reviews of how the province funds its universities, colleges, and trade schools.
The first, called the Blue Ribbon Panel on Alberta’s Finances (also called the Mackinnon Report), was led by economist Janice Mackinnon in 2019, taking a holistic look at Alberta’s spending. The report suggested that the province, after years of recession, was on the brink of economic catastrophe, saying, “Without decisive action, the province faces year after year of deficits and an ever-increasing debt.”
Researchers and economists at the Parkland Institute, however, were immediately critical of the report, saying that it wasn’t even allowed to suggest higher taxes or other revenue-generating options.
“Alberta does not face a ‘critical financial situation’ resulting from public expenditures. Though caution is warranted, Alberta currently has a manageable debt,” a Parkland Institute report says.
Still, the Mackinnon Report argued that post-secondary education institutions (PSEIs) should “achieve a revenue mix” and expand private ventures and entrepreneurship, pointing to PSEIs in BC and Ontario. It also found that Alberta pays more per student than other parts of the country, and many programs overlap across the various schools.
“Most significantly, the panel found that there does not appear to be an overall direction for Alberta’s post-secondary system.”
This sentence prompted a thorough post-secondary review, which was contracted to McKinsey & Company, an American business consulting company taking the job for $3.7 million. The information provided by McKinsey & Company isn’t publicly available despite requests for freedom of information from the Parkland Institute.
The findings of this report can be seen in Alberta 2030: Building Skills for Jobs. Contrary to MacKinnon’s knife-sharpening recommendations, this document found that research was underfunded in Alberta and that students were increasingly bearing the brunt of educational costs.
Overall, the report supported six main goals — develop skills for jobs, support innovation and commercialization, strengthen internationalization, improve sustainability and affordability, strengthen system governance and improve access and student experience
In 2024, thanks to rising oil prices, Alberta’s economy bounced back. The government was already running a multi-billion dollar surplus by 2021-22, with another in 2022-23, 2023-24, and is projected to run another surplus in 2025-26.
Since cutting more than $500 million from PSEIs after the 2019 Mackinnon report, the UCP government has recently begun funnelling some of that money back into post-secondary through target enrolment expansion.
“What that has done,” says Easton, “is actually provided the government with far more leverage over what universities can afford to do because they will only fund the programs that they believe are in the province’s interests.”
The province also introduced a performance-based funding model. These investment management agreements ensure that if certain quotas related to the goals of the Alberta 2030 report aren’t met, funding can be cut, further dictating how universities can operate.
“Alberta is funding post-secondary education in a responsible way that respects taxpayer dollars,” says Chandrasekhar.
“Through Budget 2024, we provided $1.8 billion in base grants to post-secondary institutions across Alberta. Additionally, the over-$312 million investment in Targeted Enrolment Expansion funding that we have provided to post-secondary institutions since 2022 represents the largest one-time injection of post-secondary funding in Alberta’s history.”
In 2025, up to 40 per cent of a PSEIs base operating grant could be at risk if quotas related to things like work-integrated learning aren’t hit.
As a combination, the Mackinnon report and the Alberta 2030 report can rationalize the cuts and selective investment. It’s seen in practice with target enrolment investing, funding trade schools, financing apprenticeships, and making cuts to avoid economic implosion (although perhaps that was a far-fetched worry).
What it doesn’t explain is how research is knowingly defunded or why MacEwan’s fine arts are so well funded.
Conservative beliefs may be behind some of these funding decisions.
Right-wing thinking
In March, Jordan Peterson, comparing PSEIs with Elon Musk’s mass layoffs at Twitter, called for the removal of half of the students, 90 percent of the administration, and the majority of the faculty at Canadian universities.
“The latter have not only lost their courage while bowing to the administration and then to the woke mob. They have also allowed their journals to become corrupted and their science and research programs to degenerate into propaganda produced for careerist self-promotion,” he wrote in an Op-Ed for the National Post.
Recently, another popular right-wing voice, Chris Rufo, helped get a Florida college’s gender studies program abolished while claiming that efforts in diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) were ruining universities.
Tucker Carlson, on a niche conservative podcast, opined that students in humanity programs would be better off reading 100 or so books instead of going to school.
Peterson, Rufo, and Carlson have all attended events connected to Alberta’s conservative movement. Premier Danielle Smith and Carlson have appeared at the same events.
In April, the UCP government introduced Bill 18, or the Provincial Priorities Act, with one of its goals being to create “ideological balance” at universities and defend the province’s priorities. The bill would make it so that any post-secondary institution would have to get the province’s permission before it could accept funding from the federal government. The bill came after many on the right called out universities for being ideologically misaligned. It received royal assent on May 30, 2024.
In April, the UCP government introduced Bill 18, or the Provincial Priorities Act, with one of its goals being to create “ideological balance” at universities and defend the province’s priorities.
The University of Alberta has researchers who study vaccine deployment and efficacy, critical researchers in political science who keep a close eye on government cronyism, and researchers who study harm reduction.At MacEwan, there are researchers like Dr. Kris Wells and Dr. J.J. Wright, who advocated against the government’s new legislation on healthcare for transgender people.
At the Canada Strong and Free Conference in September, Smith called Wells a “radical, extreme LGBT activist.”
Bill 18 threatens to coax researchers into falling in line with provincial priorities, as Spooner says, regardless if those priorities aren’t well-researched.
Another review
As the province is staring down an estimated 40,000 more students in PSEIs by 2028, it’s looking at doing another review of the post-secondary system to sort out revenue troubles. This time, it’s being led by economist Jack Mintz.
Mintz has served as a board member of Imperial Oil, a professor and president’s fellow at the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy, and a frequent contributor to the Fraser Institute, a conservative think tank.
We reached out to Mintz for comment on what his focus would be regarding the funding models for universities. We also asked, given his position at the University of Calgary’s school of public policy whether there were concerns about potential conflict of interest. Mintz did not respond.
The report will be the third review of the post-secondary system models in under five years. The question now is whether this report will find solutions that give freedom and autonomy back to PSEIs or if the heavy hand of the UCP will continue to steer the sector towards its vision of what post-secondary education should be.
Editor’s note: A version of this story was originally published in The Edmonton Edge.
Graphic by Forrester Toews
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