Bored?  Feel like horrifying yourself about the financial future of Canadian universities?  Here's a little something that should amuse you.

Go the Statistics Canada website and check out the most recent issue of Salaries and Salary Scales of Full-Time Teaching Staff at Canadian Universities.  Got it?  Good, now surf on over to the Chronicle of Higher Education website, where they have a searchable database of the American Association of University Professors' annual salary survey.

(GlobeCampus polls: Cast your vote in a poll on Canadian professors' pay )

While you're waiting for that to load, I want to take you back in time about 10 years.  One of the biggest worries in Canadian public life is the phenomenon of "brain drain" - highly qualified personnel leaving Canada to the greener pastures of the U.S.  There were good reasons for the drain, of course: better job opportunities, higher salaries, lower interest rates, lower tax rates and, most of all, there was the exchange rate.  In 2002 and 2003, the Canadian dollar was worth about 62 cents U.S.

Canadian employers found it very hard to compete and universities were no exception: a lot of good professors headed south in the late '90s and continued to do so after the turn of the decade.  So, it was no real surprise that, when provincial governments started turning on the spending taps for higher education about a decade ago, one of the first things they did was start raising salaries.  They did this not just to compensate staff for the years of salary restraint in the '90s, but also to make it possible to be competitive with American universities despite the low dollar. 

Got those two pages open yet?  Well, let me finish my story before you go diving into them.  Of course, the whole rationale of jacking up salaries for "competitive" purposes only made sense in the world of a sub-70-cent dollar.  Here we are seven or eight years later and the dollar is effectively at parity.  What do you think that did to comparative salaries in Canadian and American universities.

Okay, you can peek at those pages now.  Amuse yourself.  See if you can find a single American public university that pays its academic staff as much as Trent or York does.  Because I can't. 

No, I'm not kidding.  Associate professors at York make $125,000 on average and those at Trent $118,000; full professors make $150,000 and $154,000 respectively.  Compare that to salaries at UC Berkeley, which would probably top most people's lists of the best public universities in the world, where associate professors make $98,000 and full professors $146,000.  And it goes downhill from there. 

Compare Guelph to UC Davis (which has a similar if slightly more distinguished research profile) - it's about a 10-per-cent gap in favour of Guelph.  The gap between the University of Manitoba and the University of Wisconsin (easily in the Top 10 of public universities worldwide) is slightly higher than that at between 10 and 15 per cent.  The gap between the University of Calgary and the University of Washington (another Top 10 candidate) is almost 45 per cent at the associate professor level and only somewhat smaller than that at the full professor level. 

One could quibble around the edges at some of these comparisons, of course.  Marginal tax rates are different, as are things like health-care coverage. There is also the important issue of American scholars having access to compensation through research grants in the summer months (publicly available details on this are scant, but basically, research-active faculty in the U.S. probably get a salary bump of between 10 and 20 per cent on top of the figures listed here).  But the basics are clear: By any reasonable standard, even our second-tier universities have compensation packages that are up there with some of the best public universities in the world.

If one were feeling generous, one might point this out as a great opportunity.  We should be shouting this from the rooftops and hiring abroad like mad.  We'd be nuts to restrict our hiring to Canadians when we have such a huge recruitment advantage - with salaries like this, we can clearly compete with the best on the world and should be more aggressive in bringing the world's best academic talent to Canada.

If one were being less generous, however, one might begin to wonder what on earth faculty associations are thinking of when they complain about pay and conditions.  This side of Saudi Arabia, there is no public university system in the world that pays its professors better than Canada.  There is, on the contrary, a case to be made (at some universities, anyway) that professors are getting world-class pay without producing world-class results.

GlobeCampus polls: Cast your vote in a poll on Canadian professors' pay 

Back in the day, the Vikings terrified Europe, wandering from port to port at will, pillaging the countryside and taking what they liked.

Smart Canadian universities should be gearing up to do something similar.

Universities around the world are in financial trouble.  The problems are especially acute at public universities in the United States and the United Kingdom, where the effects of the recent crisis on public finances have been most severe. 

In the U.K., universities are bracing for cuts on the order of 20 per cent. In parts of the U.S. - notably at the world-class University of California - cuts to operating budgets from the states have already been on the order of 15 per cent, and the universities have really been held together only by a massive infusion of federal research funding dollars courtesy of the 2009 stimulus package.  That package's measures run out next year.

In other words, two of the world's greatest repositories of scientific talent are broke, and what that means is that there will be a lot of scientific talent losing their research budgets.  This is a highly mobile group, and they will be actively scanning the world to see where they can get the best offers to continue their work. I firmly believe that the coming out-migration from the U.S. and the U.K. will be the biggest shift in the geographic balance of world science since the cream of Russian science headed west in the early 1990s.  Certainly, it represents the end of the 70-year era in which the United States was exclusively an importer of talent. 

Smart up-and-coming universities know this and are positioning themselves to snap up top talent.   In Switzerland, for instance, the quite brilliant federal universities at Zurich and Lausanne have been doing most of their hiring out of American universities for the past three years.  Universities in China, Singapore, Hong Kong and Korea are also positioning themselves to snatch promising young researchers.

Canada is benefiting from the U.S. situation in a kind of passive way.  A number of vice-presidents have told me over the past year about the massive increase in strong U.S. applicants for faculty positions, and of instances of Deans from California applying for assistant dean positions in Canada. 

Partly, the Americans want to escape the carnage their universities are undergoing (presumably, they are unaware of the carnage that is about to be inflicted on Canadian universities as provincial governments in Atlantic Canada, Quebec and Ontario fix their budgets).  Partly, with the dollar at par, Americans are suddenly realizing that most Canadian universities are paying extremely attractive salaries.  But partly, also, the new hires are saying they just want to work somewhere that believes in public education.

But these benefits are, as I say, passive.  In typical Canadian fashion, we're just letting it happen.  Maybe the Americans are going to show up and maybe they won't.

This shouldn't be acceptable.  We need our universities - especially the ones in Western Canada, which are in a better medium-term financial position than the ones further east - to unleash their inner Viking and start pillaging. 

Pillage California.  Pillage England.  Pillage places like Italy and Hungary, which are also having major budget problems.  This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and we should be actively organizing raiding parties to gather up these rare talents while they are there for the taking.

It's what really competitive institutions would do, anyway. 

There is a tendency in some higher education circles to get a bit snooty about Tories.  The Harper government, for instance, doesn't get nearly the respect it deserves in academic circles for its investments in higher education infrastructure, large-scale scientific projects, student assistance and talent attraction schemes; instead, it gets a lot of criticism for things like its somewhat high-handed approach to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and some admittedly ham-fisted interference in academic conferences on the Middle East.  Not that one justifies the other, or anything, but the unbalanced nature of the community's reaction does betray some of that "liberal bias" that Conservatives like to talk about. 

And yet, if anything, what's remarkable about higher education policy in this country is how bi-partisan (or tri-partisan, if you throw in the odd NDP government) it is.  Across the country over the past decade, Tory, Liberal and NDP governments have all made big investments in research infrastructure.  Tory, Liberal and NDP governments have also all, at one point or another, instituted major tuition fee freezes in the name of accessibility (almost always incorrectly, but that's as may be)  just as governments from all parties have embraced the really dumb practice of jacking up tax credits. 

So I, personally, don't subscribe to the theory that Tories are anti-education; the evidence simply doesn't support it. That said, though, I have to wonder: what in God's name are the Ontario Tories thinking with their opposition to the province's new Trillium Scholarships?

To recap: the Ontario Government has announced a competitive program worth $30-million over four years, which, when fully implemented, will support 300 top graduate students from around the world.  The Tories, sensing an opportunity to get some digs in at the government, oppose it on the grounds that "it's money that should be going to Ontario students". 

The Tory talking points on this issue seem to be as follows:  1) Ontario families are hurting in these tough times, and tuition fees are contributing to that hurt; 2) To give money to foreigners to attend Ontario universities, rather than reduce costs for Ontarians "shows how out of touch Dalton McGuinty is."

What the Tories are doing here is contrasting money being spent for the purpose of long-term economic development (essentially, better graduate students means better faculty means better research and development and better economic spillovers) with money being spent on welfare.   Implicitly, the argument is that money spent to attract foreign talent for the purpose of economic growth is illegitimate, because it could be spent reducing user fees to Ontario citizens.

This, to put it mildly, is an odd position for Tories to be defending.

To start with, there is hardly an access crisis in Ontario.  No province has higher rates of PSE participation, and no province has more success at getting low-income kids into PSE.  One could point out that the province is already spending more than half a billion dollars a year on student aid, and that, in any case, spending on student aid hardly precludes spending on excellence-related measures like the Graduate Scholarships.

Next, it's highly perverse of the Ontario Tories to be blasting a Liberal provincial government for spending $30-million over four years on this kind of scholarship while keeping shtum about a Conservative federal government for spending $45-million over five years on the Vanier Scholarships which aim to do exactly the same thing as the Trillium awards (not to mention $200-million over seven years to lure foreign professors here through the Canada Excellence Research Chairs program).  

But perhaps most importantly of all, this kind of rhetoric is going to prove incredibly embarrassing to the PCs if they take power in next year's election. 

Although Tim Hudak doesn't actually include budget-balancing in his top four priorities for Ontario that he hammers home in every speech, he has been sufficiently caustic about the Liberals' 8-year deficit reduction plan to make most observers think that he intends to finish the job much more quickly.  In four years, say.

A quick look at the budget shows that the deficit is currently $18.5-billion, or just under 16 per cent of the provincial budget.  Assume that over the next four years, if they can hold the overall budget stable, economic growth might eat away about half that deficit.  That still leaves $9-billion or about 8 per cent of the budget.  How is the government going to make that up?  It isn't going to be through across-the-board cuts, because health care, is almost certainly not going to be cut.  Even holding it at zero growth will lead to calls that the Premier is a baby-killer or some such thing.  More likely, only growth in the health budget will be reined in - say to 3 per cent, or about half what it has been for most of the last decade.  But health care accounts for such a vast proportion of provincial spending that allowing it to have such an increase while balancing the rest of the budget in four years means absolutely swinging cuts elsewhere - something on the order of 18 per cent.  And that's before we get to any tax cuts that Hudak is also promising, or taking into account the likelihood that K-12 education would be exempted some of the cuts as well.

Now, a cut to the university operating grant of 18 per cent at most institutions would translate into a reduction of about 9 per cent in overall income - less if tuition is allowed to rise.  For this source of income to cancel out a cut of that magnitude would mean a rise in average tuition of something on the order of 20-25 per cent on top of the normal annual rises.  When this happens, students will be able to use Hudak's own words about how ordinary Ontario families are suffering from high tuition against him.  It will be an embarrassment, and it will be his own fault.

Now, none of this is to say that the Trillium Scholarships are above criticism.  There is probably a genuine debate to have about the right balance of spending between student aid and research-related spending like these Scholarships.  There's room to debate how many of our institutions should be research-intensive and how much public money we want to spend on making them "world-class research institutions". 

Unfortunately, those aren't debates the Ontario Tories seem to want to have. They've let this week's announcement of $15-million in money for neuroscience research go without comment, so it isn't that they're worried generally about trade-offs between research expenditures and affordability.  Apparently, it is only when money goes to foreign students at Ontario universities that it becomes an issue. One Conservative MPP I was speaking to last week assured me that whatever great research might be achieved by foreign graduate students, he and his colleagues were convinced that the same could be achieved by Ontario-born graduate students.

Nice, proud sentiments, I suppose, but I'm quite sure the Tories are smart enough (or have enough smart friends in the business world) to realize that in a global War for Talent, you're always going to have better results picking from a potential pool of 6 billion people than you are from a pool of 14 million.  Were they to pursue this line of thinking in government, it would be very damaging indeed.  Following that logic, banning Ontario companies from hiring foreign talent would also be a fantastic idea because "Ontario executives could do just as good a job."  Tea Party-style nativism, here we come!

I'm prepared to believe, based on the record of the Conservative governments in Ottawa and other provincial capitals, that a Hudak government wouldn't be inimical to higher education (or at least not more so than any other party).  But this current episode suggests that the Ontario Tories still have the mindset of an opposition party, rather than that of a government-in-waiting.  If they want to take power as anything more than a protest party, they're going to have to up their game a bit.  And what that means is taking a longer look at the various roles post-secondary education plays in the economy, rather than rush to take cheap shots for the sake of short-term popularity.

Recently, my company conducted a survey in which just over 5,000 students were asked about their favourite and least-favourite classes of the previous semester, in order to understand the factors that made for students' most positive and negative academic experiences.

There were four important take-aways from the survey:

1)      Students aren't slackers.  Easy work-loads don't make students more likely to like a course; hard work-loads aren't the reason students dislike certain courses.  Workload is basically a non-factor.

2)      Size doesn't matter (much).  Out of nine possible factors that students were asked to rate as making a class one's favourite or least favourite, class size came second from the bottom.  That said, students' favourite classes did tend, on average, to be somewhat smaller than their least-favourite classes.

3)      Technology doesn't matter much, either.  Even in the more science- and technology-based disciplines, factors such as up-to-date lab equipment and the use of technology in the classroom were relatively unimportant factors in making for exceptionally good or bad learning experiences. 

4)      It's all about the instructor - and the instructing.  By far and away, the three factors that contribute most to making a particular course a favourite or a non-favourite are: having interesting course subject matter; having an instructor with an engaging teaching style; and having interesting course materials or texts (the order of the three is slightly different for favourites and non-favourites, but the three together are Top 3 in both).  Interestingly, the presence (or absence) of other engaged students is more or less a non-factor in making a course a favourite or a non-favourite.  This is in stark contradiction to most theory in teaching and learning, which stresses the ways in which students learn from and push one another in the learning process.

Now, with the possible exception of the finding on class sizes (which sounds counterintuitive but has been noted by a number of studies going back almost 20 years), none of this should come as much of a surprise to institutions.  Of course, great learning experiences happen when good teachers are teaching interesting material - what could be more natural?

But if it's so natural, why don't universities have processes in place that specifically focus on these things?

Take teaching quality for instance: Which universities have formal processes to ensure - not encourage, but ensure - that instructors have some pedagogical ability?  Which universities base merit pay and promotion on teaching quality?  Which universities require professors with persistently mediocre teaching evaluations to take some training in pedagogy? 

Or take the creation and approval of new courses.  Often - especially in the humanities - the selection of courses offered is driven more by professors' research interests than either the interests of students or any semblance of a coherent curriculum (the latter having been effectively thrown out the window between 30 and 40 years ago in favour of the smorgasboard approach to course selection).  Given these results, why is student demand for new courses not taken into account more systematically? 

The basic reason here is misalignment of incentives.  As long as government funds each student place the same regardless of satisfaction or outcome, there will be no reason to change the status quo.  As long as student demand outstrips the availability of places, institutions don't have much incentive to compete for students (and their dollars) and so don't change their practices. 

I think, though, that we may be on the cusp of some serious change in this respect.  Government expenditure on universities is set to contract significantly in many provinces (Ontario especially) as they grapple with growing deficits and increasing health-care costs.  That may set the stage for a re-think of funding formulae. In much of the country, universities are facing declining enrolments for the next decade and a half and are going to have to compete much harder for students. 

To date, most institutions have made only cosmetic changes as they compete for students: a new gym here, better food services there.  A few - the University of Western Ontario comes to mind here - have made efforts to have a holistic view of student services and the student experience and made significant investments accordingly.  But those efforts have tended to stop at the classroom door.  What hasn't happened anywhere (to my knowledge) is a more concerted policy effort to improve students' learning experiences.  They collect data about classroom experiences, sure, but almost nowhere is there a process where that data is used to adjust behaviour in a systematic way. 

But as the demographic and financial crunch continues, the alignment of incentives may change.  Governments may loosen their tuition policies, making variable pricing a possibility.  This will improve the potential returns to institutions that make substantial changes to their academic processes so as to concentrate on pedagogical excellence.  Since demonstrated pedagogical excellence has to be a better selling feature than having the best on-campus catering, one would think that the pricing premium for institutions that can really get it right could be quite large.

Excellence in learning isn't tough: Put great teachers with great material on interesting, relevant subjects in front of a class and you'll get some happy, engaged students.  And it's those happy, engaged students which is what makes a great learning environment.  We've just managed to screw things up by not rewarding those institutions that manage to get this right.    Hopefully, that's about to change, and better institutions will prosper accordingly.