Eight months into my two-year term on the Mount Royal University (MRU) board of governors, I wrote to the president, board chair and my fellow members, begging them in January 2020 to “reject performance-based metrics in whatever form they take, and demand stable, secure funding with autonomy for institutions to determine the best way to spend those funds.”
The provincial government had just announced its plans to tie a portion of public funding for post-secondary institutions to specific measurable outcomes such as “graduate employment rate two years after graduation, graduate median income, employers’ assessment of graduate skills and competencies, and percentage of recent post-secondary graduates who report that the program they took was worth the cost.”
“Our new approach,” explained then-minister of advanced education Demetrios Nicolaides, “will help ensure students are set up for success by encouraging institutions to produce job-ready graduates. Students make a significant investment in their post-secondary education, and it is essential we do everything possible to give them a rewarding career at the end of their studies. By shifting the focus to performance, we will ensure taxpayer dollars are being used in the most responsible way possible.”
But performance-based metrics, says University of Regina professor of education Marc Spooner, threaten collegial governance and institutional autonomy, lead to further cutbacks in public funding, and undercut “the traditional mission of educating people, not just workers, and contributing to social and economic development.”
At MRU, for instance, the faculty, students, staff and administrators on various internal decision-making bodies have decided that every degree should include liberal education requirements meant to provide students “a well-rounded knowledge base in a variety of areas.” But under the UCP government’s new metrics, unless these classes provide workplace experiences or earn mention on student satisfaction surveys, they are likely ineligible for provincial funding.
Never mind that “the world of work is transforming rapidly,” as Spooner says in an analysis of performance-based funding for the Canadian Association of University Teachers, and that employers increasingly require the “ ‘soft’ skills like problem solving, communication, interpersonal skills and critical thinking… where universities excel.”
As well, outcomes such as graduate employment rates and incomes: are nearly impossible to track; assume economic output as the only benefit of higher education; penalize the arts and basic sciences, despite evidence of long-term earning potential (and other advantages); and ignore that “universities do not control the labour market, and governments are poor at predicting future labour market needs.”
Based on that and more, I asked my fellow board members at MRU to reject the government’s new metrics and, by extension, the further commercialization of Alberta’s post-secondary sector. They refused.
I asked my fellow board members at MRU to reject the government’s new performance metrics. They refused.
Since at least the Klein era, and government-promoted “market-friendly” policies such as tax cuts, austerity, user fees and privatization, universities have been forced to adopt “private-sector management practices,” “a customer orientation coupled with consumer choice and branding,” “outsourc[ed] labour with casual, temporary staff; and emphasi[s on] greater output performance measures and controls in the name of efficiency and accountability.”
This descent into neoliberal-inspired corporatization and privatization was exacerbated by a unique feature of Alberta’s post-secondary system: rather than enrolments or the actual costs of programs, provincial funding for higher education is largely based on the particular whims of governments.
Traditionally, institutions receive annual block grants from the province for operating expenses plus additional moneys for targeted capital (and other) projects. Funding fluctuates greatly from year to year, making long-term planning difficult. Still, allocations are made through collegial governance, largely without external interference.
But the UCP government has clear plans to upend and transform the sector.
There are, says Spooner, “competing philosophical visions for education. On one side … education should encourage democratic citizenship, support community engagement and social activism, and foment an appreciation for the intrinsic and emancipatory value of knowledge. On the other side there is … an increasingly instrumentalized university that primarily serves corporate and economic interests.”
For the UCP, post-secondary (like the rest of society) exists solely for the benefit of the market and must provide conditions conducive to the maximization of corporate profits. In government, says the 2022 Parkland Institute report Higher Education—Corporate or Public? How the UCP is Restructuring Post-Secondary Education in Alberta, the UCP has “implemented a multi-pronged strategy to remake the province’s post-secondary education institutions according to [a] vision … less as providers of public goods … and more as ‘businesses’ that should produce commodities and attract private sector investment.”
“[G]overnment funds,” argued premier Jason Kenney in September 2022, “should align with labour market demands…. That’s why we’re trying to retool the education system.”
Attempting to align government with the market is not new in Alberta. But Kenney and the UCP aim to push that alignment further than ever. He saw students, his biographer Jeremy Appel points out, “as units of economic measurement, judged by their ability to get a job, consume, start a traditional family and not ask too many questions.”
And, following the April 2019 election, they put their plans in motion.
The first step in the UCP strategy was to defund the provincial treasury through the passage of the Job Creation Tax Cut, which lowered corporate tax rates from 12 per cent to 8 per cent over four years. According to researcher Ian Hussey, Alberta’s major oil companies alone saved around $4.3-billion between 2019 and 2022. At the same time, the number of jobs in the sector declined by nearly 3,500.
With provincial coffers shrinking, the August 2019 Report and Recommendations of the Blue Ribbon Panel on Alberta’s Finances (a.k.a. the MacKinnon report)—prohibited by Kenney from including revenues in its analysis—unsurprisingly recommended massive public spending cuts to balance the provincial budget. “[T]here can be no increases in government expenditures for four years,” it concluded, “and in fact the provincial government will actually need to reduce operating spending by at least $600-million and substantially reduce capital spending.”
Post-secondaries, specifically, needed to “be cut to a level comparable to… Ontario or BC…. [This] would mean a reduction of operating grants by 10 per cent to 18 per cent below their current level.”
Between 2019 and 2023, provincial “funding cuts to post-secondary education totalled more than half a billion dollars,” a sum that, reports journalist Cailynn Klingbeil, “represents a staggering 31 per cent cut to funding.”
The flagship University of Alberta was hit harder than most. “To put the magnitude of the operating cuts in proper perspective,” Spooner explains, the cuts to the U of A “represented a 34 per cent reduction in provincial funding— $222-million less—that had to be reconciled in 24 months.”
This drastic slashing, says U of A professor Laurie Adkin, resulted in the elimination of “800 non-academic positions through layoffs and retirements… and estimates [that] 1,200 full-time positions will be gone by the time the administrative restructuring has been completed. In addition, the contracts of hundreds of academic teaching staff have not been renewed. Retiring faculty are not, for the most part, being replaced.” The government expected that “this huge loss of revenue” would be made up “by generating money from ‘entrepreneurial and commercial ventures,’ cutting operating costs and raising tuition.”
“Only a decade ago,” Adkin says, “about 66 per cent of the U of A’s operating revenue came from its provincial grants.” By 2025 that figure was down to 39 per cent, according to the Blue Ribbon Panel. Tuition and related fees, on the other hand, rose from 23 per cent of revenues a decade ago to 31 per cent in 2025.
The Blue Ribbon report also concluded that higher education must align with provincial government priorities (i.e., improving economic conditions for oil and gas companies), and, according to Spooner, “it is difficult to see … its recommendations for using indicators that sharply narrow the meaning of ‘performance’ to labour-market, industry and economic outcomes as anything but an ideologically based attempt to redesign the fundamental mission of Alberta’s universities.”
This led to the 2020 introduction of performance-based metrics.
And my resignation from the MRU board that February.
“The Board,” I wrote in my resignation letter to minister Nicolaides, “was abandoning its responsibility to act in the best interests, including the fiduciary interests, of the institution…. I can no longer remain on a body”—one responsible “for the stewardship of the University” and “strengthening Mount Royal’s reputation by providing our students with exceptional learning experiences”—“that has chosen to support a funding model that will devastate the sector, and the students we educate, for generations.”
I should have seen it coming.
Back in August 2019, the government had stacked decision-making boards with sympathetic public members, under the rationale that this change would “strengthen… financial oversight and connections to industry.” All told, according to the Parkland Institute’s 2022 Higher Education report, “[a]t least 42 of the UCP public appointees… (nearly 28 per cent) have important links to the oil and gas sector. That number increases if we include appointees from the corporate services and construction firms that rely on the oil and gas sector for contracts, or the banks and investment firms that finance and/or own shares in oil and gas companies.”
“In many cases,” suggests MRU faculty member and Canadian Association of University Teachers vice-president, Marc Schroeder, “new board members hold high-level positions at corporations that benefit directly from the UCP’s deep cut to Alberta’s corporate tax rate, which, at 8 per cent [after the Job Creation Tax Cut], is now the lowest by far among Canadian provinces.” For example, MRU’s new board chair, Alex Pourbaix, was then president and CEO of Cenovus Energy, a Calgary-based oil and gas company that raked in $21-billion in revenues in 2019 and, thanks to the tax break, contributed hundreds of millions less to the provincial treasury.
Pourbaix and his newly appointed peers on the board proceeded to approve tuition increases year after year after year, further shifting the financial burden for education onto already struggling students. Since 2020, tuition in Alberta has risen 32 per cent, “far outpacing the overall rate of inflation and eclipsing the national average of about 17 per cent.”
“University presidents, vice-presidents and other senior administrators—along with the UCP-appointed public members of the boards of governors,” the Parkland’s Higher Education report says, “remained silent, acquiesced to or even endorsed the [government’s] restructuring rationale without publicly questioning its wisdom or necessity. It appears that the UCP has succeeded in bringing the boards and the executives into alignment with its agenda.”
The UCP government’s vision is a post-secondary sector that serves the market.
In correspondence with me, Pourbaix was also quite patronizing, requesting collegiality following my January letter. “Please don’t worry that I’m going to be hard on you for your views,” he wrote, demanding a call that he never got around to scheduling.
“Honestly,” I replied, “I’m not worried about you going hard on me. I’m not on the board to make friends or connections, but rather to fight in whatever ways I can for MRU. It may not fit with what you think is effective for boards, but I will use every tool in my toolbox to advocate for the institution.”
But that proved difficult. Based on my experience, Schroeder is correct in his suggestion that “a university governance structure … directly accountable to a UCP-appointed board means that senior management cannot be relied upon to mount any meaningful defence of their institutions despite being their nominal leaders.” This was clear in their easy acceptance of a performance-based funding model.
COVID-19 slowed initial plans, but in April 2021 the $3.7-million McKinsey Report—Alberta 2030: Building Skills for Jobs—reiterated the government’s market-oriented vision of higher education. The purpose, the final document says, is “[t]o do everything we can to ensure that more of Alberta’s youth and workforce … are well positioned to succeed in rewarding careers today and tomorrow.” The sector, then, should focus on six main goals: “improve access and student experience; develop skills for jobs; support innovation and commercialization; strengthen internationalization; improve sustainability and affordability; and strengthen system governance.”
None of these goals relate to critical thinking, problem solving or citizenship, despite regular evidence from sources such as the Royal Bank of Canada’s report Humans Wanted: How Canadian youth can thrive in the age of disruption that employers actually want more problem solvers and critical thinkers, people who can express their thoughts clearly and effectively and who can adapt and adjust to the evolving circumstances of these rapidly changing times.
“Enshrined in the Ministry of Advanced Education’s ‘Vision 2030 agenda,’” the Parkland report explains, “the UCP worldview for post-secondary education privileges ‘industry’ needs and the commodification of teaching and research ahead of any benefit to the public interest.”
Adds Schroeder, “the overarching, single-minded goal will be the realignment of institutional priorities according to the interests of employers and industry.”
The latest step in this reorientation of higher education to serve the market was the Expert Panel on Post-Secondary Institution Funding and Alberta’s Competitiveness: Report and Recommendations, otherwise known as the “Mintz report” after its chair, University of Calgary economist Jack Mintz, that—finally!—recommended a formal funding model for the province.
Released in September 2025, the report acknowledged the status quo is in fact untenable, particularly given we “are looking at a 40 per cent increase in the size of the traditional post-secondary population” due to “the biggest youth population explosion in the past 50 years.” The authors suggest that since “the province has reached its fiscal goal… of bringing per capita spending on post-secondary education down to the average of the three largest provinces[,]… funding is [now] needed to keep pace with growing student enrolment and rising costs.”
They also recognize that post-secondary institutions “help build citizenship and provide cultural and learning opportunities for the broader public” and propose public moneys for base operating grants, IT infrastructure and targeted programs to attract the best researchers and projects.
Post-secondaries, the authors insist, “are better placed [than employers or employees] to educate and train students and respond to the changing needs of the economy… Faculty provide expertise to businesses, organizations and governments…. [I]nstitutions create demand for resources provided by the community and are a source of employment.”
All to the good. But as the saying goes, the devil is in the details.
The suggested funding model attaches funds to enrolments, a common enough approach, but it includes differential transfers based on “cost of programs, market demand and government priorities.” One could imagine that the arts—particularly the humanities and fine arts—would receive substantially less support than, say, business or engineering or, before the explosion of AI and the largely unanticipated shift in the labour market, coding.
Mintz, not unlike MacKinnon and McKinsey, also “focuses on outcomes, providing incentives and rewarding performance.” He suggests institutions receive a percentage of their grants if they meet government benchmarks in teaching, research and community engagement. The metrics suggested by Mintz include: employment outcomes and student and employer satisfaction surveys; commercialization, patents, licences and scholarly citations; and contributions to the workforce and local challenges, and financial support from companies and organizations.
Once again, none of these metrics consider critical thinking, problem solving or citizenship and engagement; they tie every outcome to industry and the labour market.
None of these metrics consider critical thinking, problem solving or citizenship.
The Mintz report also recommends raising tuition fees to cover the “increasing costs in institutions.” How much fees should rise, the authors suggest, should, like enrolment grants, depend on the area of study and, for the duration of a student’s program, be limited to 2 per cent per year to ensure some predictability. While this is perhaps preferable to the present uncertainty, where fees might jump 30 per cent over the course of a degree, governments can continue to assert their priorities by differentiating the cost of studies and can further devolve the financial responsibilities for higher education from the province (the collective) onto the “customer” (the individual).
It’s unclear how this strategy aligns with the goal laid out in the Alberta 2030 report to “ensure all Albertans have access to high-quality post-secondary opportunities.” Or how the greater administrative requirements associated with performance-based funding—after all, we have to prove we meet the benchmarks—would allow the government, as the Mintz panel recommended, to “take steps to untie the hands of post-secondary institutions, reduce regulatory controls and unnecessary reporting requirements and focus more on the outcomes that institutions achieve for students and the workforce.” As the authors themselves ask, “If the province contributes less than half of institutions’ funding, how much control should it have over how revenues are spent?”
Based on this logic, shouldn’t students have a much greater voice in the budgeting process? Corporations already do have such a voice through majority representation on the boards of governors.
As I told minister Nicolaides in 2020, in a statement that still applies after the 2025 Mintz report, “The model you have proposed will not provide the stable, secure and predictable funding required by institutions of higher learning to properly plan their offerings and services to best benefit our students and society; it will instead lead to constant uncertainty, reduced quality, more red tape and more pressure on our already struggling students.”
But the UCP government continues to care little about these outcomes. Its vision is a post-secondary sector that serves the market. That produces profitable research without pesky upfront investments. Or the annoying taxes that can instead enrich shareholders while individual “clients” pay the price. Run by institutional decision-making bodies stacked with ideological allies. “I consider advanced education,” said Myles McDougall, Nicolaides’s successor, in 2025, “to be an economic portfolio… an important pillar for economic development of our province.”
As a result of these provincial policies, higher education in Alberta is in trouble.
At MRU about half of our courses are taught by sessional instructors who, despite their advanced degrees (and massive student debts), get paid thousands of dollars less than we lucky full-timers to teach classes they must reapply for every four months. They receive no benefits. No pension. No job security.
My students are struggling to balance their education with family responsibilities and multiple part-time jobs that fail to keep pace with rising tuition and the cost of living. They stress about the grades they need to get into the “right” programs—nursing, education, engineering, medicine, law, business—and the money “wasted” on “irrelevant” general education requirements. In the post-secondary environment fostered by the UCP, these students are not being inspired to become critical thinkers and democratic citizens with “an appreciation for the intrinsic and emancipatory value of knowledge.” Instead, they are often taking degrees they hate, desperate for the job supposedly waiting at the end. Spoiler alert: it usually isn’t.
The funding model the Mintz panel recommends does nothing to address these problems. It only advances the UCP strategy to make higher education in the province into a sector that serves industry, not society (or even students).
If we accept, as Nicolaides said upon the establishment of the Expert Panel on Post-Secondary Institution Funding and Alberta’s Competitiveness, that “Alberta’s higher education institutions are critical to Alberta’s prosperity,” then we must demand autonomous, affordable, accessible, publicly funded education that benefits all Albertans.
Roberta Lexier is a professor at Mount Royal University, cross-appointed to the departments of general education and humanities.
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