Report at a Glance:
Focus on Outcomes, Centre on Students: Perspectives on Evolving Ontario's University Funding Model
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- $3.5 billion in operating grants to universities
- Enhancing quality and the overall student experience
- Supporting the existing differentiation process
- Increasing transparency and accountability
- Addressing financial sustainability
- Broad sector engagement with over 25 meetings and 20 written submissions
Quality and Student Experience
- Defining and measuring quality is difficult
- Student success is still the priority
- Focus on undergraduate teaching
- Strong services contribute to student success
- Support faculty renewal
- Supporting innovative programming and quality infrastructure
- Good job conditions contribute to a better student experience
- Preparing students for employment
- Outcomes matter, but opinions vary about how to weigh them
Differentiation
- The many facets of differentiation
- Focusing on university strengths
- Supporting regional diversity
- Excellence in research and graduate education should be supported
- Strategic Mandate Agreements help drive differentiation
- Outcomes-based funding could support differentiation
Transparency and Accountability
- Strengthening transparency
- What students need to know about universities – and what decision makers need to know about students
- The funding formula should be clear
- Better data and reporting are needed
- Oversee, don’t overstep
- Alignment with government policies is important
Financial Sustainability
- Ensuring predictability and stability of funding
- Assessing the international opportunity
- Funding formula should recognize universities’ cost realities
- Challenges to sustainability
- Respecting autonomy and encouraging collaboration
- Funding should be fair
- Current weighting system needs revision
- Funding model changes must be phased in
- Colleges on implementation
Quality and Student Experience
- Viewing quality in terms of learning outcomes is consistent with a student-centric perspective.
- Effectiveness of linking funds to discrete components of student experience is unclear.
- Universities are seen to value research excellence over teaching excellence.
- Experiential learning and research opportunities enrich the undergraduate student experience.
Differentiation
- Several groups of universities exist with shared interests and needs.
- Sector acknowledges the benefits of moving away from a one-size-fits-all approach to university funding.
- SMAs are widely seen as the Ministry’s best tool to tie funding to differentiation.
Transparency and Accountability
- Progress must be made on cleaning-up components of the funding model.
- While there is a large volume of data on universities, not all of it is transparent, validated or made relevant to the public.
- The lack of coherent data places limits on funding formula reform and evidence-based policymaking.
- Some issues facing universities are outside the current governance relationship with the ministry.
Financial Sustainability
- Universities are managing operating budgets through enrolment growth, economies of scale and teaching efficiencies.
- The current funding model will contribute to the vulnerability of universities with declining enrolments, but reallocations may not fully address financial challenges.
- A strengthened role for the ministry is needed to ensure universities remain sustainable.
1.The basics
- Apply an outcomes lens to all ministry investments, with a focus on undergraduate student success as a starting point
- Ensure data is validated, coherent, centralized and easily accessible
- Introduce an outcomes-based component of funding that could grow overtime
- Full implementation should occur over two Strategic Mandate Agreement (SMA) cycles, with the first element put in place for the 2017 negotiations
Student Success
- Employment outcomes
- Graduation
- Labour market preparedness
- Learning outcomes
- Participation
- Outreach and opportunity
- Retention
- Student satisfaction
- Time-to-completion
2. Champion and implement the assessment of learning outcomes
- Current work on learning outcomes should be accelerated.
- In an ideal end-state, measuring and assessing learning outcomes should be a priority for institutions and a condition of funding.
3. Fulfil the ministry’s stewardship role
- Ongoing engagement
- Outcomes lens linked to SMAs with public reporting
- Differential treatment of similar group interests in SMAs
- Strengthened ministry enrolment planning role
- Improved financial health monitoring and cost benchmarking
4. Modernize Ontario’s funding methodology
- Phase-in of outcomes-based funding component that grows over time
- Model clean-up
- Consolidated envelopes for existing student and institutional grants
- Program cost review
- Enrolment-based funding with transition and conditional protection for declines
5. What about research?
- Increase understanding of indirect and direct costs of sponsored research
- Link graduate activity to research excellence and negotiated strengths through SMAs
- Monitor resources dedicated to teaching and research
- Include research excellence in outcomes lens
Current
- Limited ability to identify and improve student outcomes and skills
- Fragmented data
- "One-size-fits-all" approach with enrolment growth as main revenue source
- Institution-specific, programmatic focus
- Funding methodology poorly understood with unexplainable historical factors
Transition
- Student and outcomes lens applied to funding
- Learning outcomes measured and made available
- Validated, standardized and readily accessible data
- Ministry stewardship of funding relationship with universities well-defined
- Progress on sustainability
- Rational, defensible and transparent funding methodology
Future
- Continuous improvement in student learning and system outcomes
- Strengthened funding levers help Strategic Mandate Agreements drive specialization
- Broad student success measures offset enrolment-driven allocations
- Student, economic and social development supported in a productive and sustainable manner
- Impact on colleges of university funding reform
- Faculty renewal, pension reform and inflation
- Experiential education and entrepreneurial learning
- Employer engagement
- Role of universities in quality assurance
- Tuition and the Ontario Student Assistance Program
- Operating grant escalator
