1996 ANNUAL REPORT,
PROVINCIAL AUDITOR
MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING
CONTENTS
Thursday 28 November 1996
1996 annual report, Provincial Auditor: Ministry of Education and Training
Ms Jill Hutcheon, acting deputy minister
Mr David Trick, assistant deputy minister, post-secondary education
Ms Catriona King, director, colleges branch
STANDING COMMITTEE ON PUBLIC ACCOUNTS
Chair / Président: Mr Dalton McGuinty (Ottawa South / -Sud L)
Vice-Chair / Vice-Président: Mr Mike Colle (Oakwood L)
Mr Marcel Beaubien (Lambton PC)
*Mr Dave Boushy (Sarnia PC)
Mr Gary Carr (Oakville South / -Sud PC)
*Mr Mike Colle (Oakwood L)
*Mr Bruce Crozier (Essex South / -Sud L)
Mrs Brenda Elliott (Guelph PC)
*Mr Gary Fox (Prince Edward-Lennox-South Hastings / Prince Edward-Lennox-
Hastings-Sud PC)
Mr Steve Gilchrist (Scarborough East / -Est PC)
Mr John Hastings (Etobicoke-Rexdale PC)
Mr Gerard Kennedy (York South / -Sud L)
Ms Shelley Martel (Sudbury East / -Est ND)
Mr Dalton McGuinty (Ottawa South / -Sud L)
Mr Gilles Pouliot (Lake Nipigon / Lac-Nipigon ND)
Mr Toni Skarica (Wentworth North / -Nord PC)
*In attendance /présents
Substitutions present /Membres remplaçants présents:
Mr Toby Barrett (Norfolk PC) for Mr Beaubien
Mr Ed Doyle (Wentworth East / -Est PC) for Mr Skarica
Mr Jim Flaherty (Durham Centre / -Centre PC) for Mr Gilchrist
Mr Bill Grimmett (Muskoka-Georgian Bay / Muskoka-Baie-Georgienne PC)
for Mrs Elliott
Mr Tony Martin (Sault Ste Marie ND) for Ms Martel
Also taking part /Autres participants et participantes:
Mr Erik Peters, Provincial Auditor
Clerk / Greffière: Ms Donna Bryce
Staff / Personnel: Ms Elaine Campbell, research officer, Legislative Research Service
The committee met at 1033 in room 228, following a closed session.
1996 ANNUAL REPORT, PROVINCIAL AUDITOR
MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING
The Vice-Chair (Mr Mike Colle): Welcome to the standing committee on public accounts. Please begin by introducing yourself and your position.
Ms Jill Hutcheon: I am Jill Hutcheon, the acting deputy minister of the Ministry of Education and Training.
Mr David Trick: My name is David Trick. I am the assistant deputy minister for post-secondary education for the Ministry of Education and Training.
Ms Catriona King: I am Catriona King, the director of the colleges branch.
The Vice-Chair: Welcome. We'll begin with a presentation for the committee.
Ms Hutcheon: I'd like to call upon David Trick to present the ministry's opening statement.
Mr Trick: I thought it might be helpful for the committee if we spent about 15 minutes explaining a little about our perspectives on the findings the Provincial Auditor made with respect to the college system. Following that, of course we'd be pleased to take as many questions as we can.
I believe everyone has a copy of a slide package we presented to members. Let me start with the second slide. The report of the Provincial Auditor on the college system comes to us at a time that's quite helpful to us, for two reasons: one is that as a ministry we are in the process of a significant policy review on what we want to achieve through the post-secondary education system; the second is that as a ministry we have recently reorganized to try to devote better attention to post-secondary education in general and colleges in particular.
As you see, the minister appointed in July a panel on future directions for post-secondary education, and that panel will report back to the minister on December 15. They've been asked to look at what we expect not only from colleges but also from the university system, with three particular questions in mind. One is the sharing of costs within the post-secondary sector, sharing between government, students and the private sector. The second question we asked them was to advise us on cooperation between institutions, both within each sector and between colleges and universities. The third question we asked them to report on was how to meet the future demand for post-secondary education, given that the number of students wanting to attend has been growing and is expected to continue to grow.
Following that policy review, the minister will obviously have an opportunity to respond to the panel's report, and we're hopeful that this exercise will help us in shaping some specific expectations for both the college and the university systems.
Internally, we are at the same time changing both our structure and our expectations of ourselves. Like all ministries, the Ministry of Education and Training has published a business plan this past year, trying to focus our own energies on providing strategic advice and direction for the education system; providing cost-effective programming and accountability; and in general trying to improve the specific expectations we have across the education system, of which colleges of course are a very important part. Within the college sector, we're aiming to achieve more relevant programming, more effective programming, and trying to make sure the colleges can be flexible and responsive in meeting changes in student demand in future.
On an organizational basis, we created this past summer a division responsible for post-secondary education, of which I am in charge. For a number of years, the ministry has not had any particular part of the organization responsible for colleges or for universities. Both sets of institutions have told us we needed to change that, and the former deputy took action this past summer to do so. I am the assistant deputy minister for that division, and Catriona King, who joined us in August, is the director of the colleges branch.
Let me take a brief minute to describe the college system as it now stands. I am on slide 4. We have 25 colleges; 22 of those are English-language colleges, three are French-language colleges. Collectively they have about 136,000 full-time students this year, as well as 190,000 part-time students. In addition, they have 407,000 part-time, non-post-secondary students. Those are typically people coming in for short training courses of perhaps a week's or two weeks' or three weeks' duration.
The average age of college students this year is 25 years old. Some 38% of them apply directly from high school to the college; in other words, the majority do not come straight out of high school. They've either had experience in the labour force or they come to colleges from, say, universities or from some other background. Some of them have been out of the labour force for some number of years. Academic staff, about 8,000; support staff, about 6,400. That includes many staff who don't directly teach but who are involved in -- say, laboratory assistants or some other academic function.
Le me turn to the question of the responsibilities of college boards of governors. Every college has its own board of governors, has 17 representatives. One is the president, four represent staff and students of the college, and the other 12 are from the community, particularly from employers or other groups within the community who would have a direct need for the services of college graduates.
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Boards are required by both regulation and policy to set the general purpose and direction for each of their individual colleges and for ensuring that the colleges are efficiently and effectively managed, including their financial management, management of their physical plant and so on. They're responsible for establishing policies that have college-wide application, and they're responsible for promoting effective communication with the college community. By virtue of the fact that 12 of the 17 members are from the community, there is an intention to have a close relationship with people who are potential employers.
The employment profile among college graduates is something we survey every year, and we have a number of years of data on this. Six months after graduation every college graduate is contacted, or at least attempted to be contacted, to find out what their employment status is six months later. We see, for example, that for 1995 graduates, 82.6% said they were employed six months after graduation. The balance are either unemployed or, in many cases, have chosen not to be in the labour force because, for instance, they may have gone on to further education or they may have family responsibilities which mean they're temporarily not in the labour force. That figure, 82.6%, has been fairly constant for the past four years. There was a bit of a dip in 1993 when the recession was at its worst.
One of the questions we ask the student is, is your employment directly related to your field of study? There you see the performance is not as strong. For the most recent year it's 47%, and that figure's been fairly constant in recent years. It's much different from what it was during the peak of the economic boom in the 1980s. In 1987, for example, the figure of directly related employment was a little bit over 80%. This figure has diminished quite a bit for reasons we need to know more about.
For instance, if a student says, "My employment isn't directly related to my field of study," we need to know, was it closely related or was it not at all related? Is it a job that really they didn't need college at all for? The survey doesn't tell us that.
We also need to know, for students who have taken a course of study and then are not working in that field, was there something they could have known about at the start of that course of study or did circumstances change while they were students?
In addition, in future we'd like to set some better benchmarks so there is improvement in this area, so we need to determine, what is a good benchmark? Given the current condition of the labour force, what is an appropriate percentage that we should aim for?
Those are all areas where we need to know more and where we need to set better targets.
To continue on page 7, in terms of the employment profile by specific program area, you see it's not uniform across the case. In most programs the share of students who subsequently are employed six months later is 80% or better. There are a couple where that's not the case, technology being 75% there.
In terms of relatedness to program of study, the highest performance is in the hospitality programs and the lowest performance is in social services and in nursing programs, and those reflect, obviously, the employment circumstances in those sectors. We do have those data, and we can break them down for every college and for every program.
We talk a bit about enrolment patterns in the colleges in slide 8. Enrolment has grown quite substantially, and in large measure that's due to the changing economy. When there are larger numbers of people who cannot immediately gain employment when they leave high school, of course the question arises, would they do better if they went to college, and many of them take that route. As well, there has been a long-term trend towards more jobs that require beyond high school education. Both those reasons, the cyclical ones and the long-term structural ones, are driving more people to attend colleges.
You'll see that there's been fairly flat enrolment for the last two years: 136,000 this year and just a shade under that last year, but quite substantially up from the late 1980s.
On slide 9, you'll see that the college system has actually been affected more than other parts of the education system by the growth of enrolment. Over a 10-year period there's a 42% increase for colleges versus 16% for universities and 15% for schools, schools obviously drawing on a different age group.
Another factor that influences the accessibility of the college system is tuition levels. Tuition is set by the province, and for the current year it's $1,275 per college student for a nine-month program. By comparison, university programs are almost $3,000 this year, being the average for an arts and science program.
We do provide student assistance to college students as well as to university students. So far in 1996-97 we have 69,000 college students receiving OSAP, some of those part-time, some full-time; that's about one third of the total full-time/part-time enrolment. The average college student loan is $7,300, but that obscures the fact that they're in different family circumstances. For a single college student, the average is about $6,000, obviously higher for people who have family responsibilities.
Slide 11, productivity improvements in the college sector: Here we look at, what is the cost per full-time student at colleges on average? This is measured in constant 1986 dollars. You see that there has been improvement in cost-per-student ratios over the past decade, and particularly in the last five or six years.
In measuring this, we take the operating grant that the province provides, we add in the revenues that come from student tuition, and we divide it by the number of full-time equivalent students at the colleges. You see the change from about $5,800 in 1986 to about $4,100 in 1996. Again, these are all measured in 1986 dollars. The current year, if you measure it in current dollars, is $4,731.
Let me say just before we leave that, with respect to the financial viability of the college system, obviously, as colleges have been driven to become more productive and to make better use of the dollars we can provide to them and that students can provide to them, there's been a need on our part to monitor very closely the financial health of every college to ensure its viability.
Under regulation, every college that finds itself in a position of having an operating debt is required to seek the minister's approval for that. Our present minister has a requirement that in order to get that approval, one has to provide a plan for getting out of debt within two years, and we monitor every three months the progress of colleges in meeting their plan for getting out of debt. That process is in place, so that at the same time we're driving productivity improvements we are also trying to keep a close touch on the financial health of each college.
Let me now turn to the report of the Provincial Auditor and some of the specific issues it raises. I'm on page 12. The stated objectives of the audit were threefold: first, to measure and report on the effectiveness in achieving legislative and stated goals and objectives for the colleges; second, ensuring that colleges deliver quality programs economically, efficiently and in compliance with the statutes; and third, monitoring the financial condition of the colleges and controlling payments that are made to colleges under the act. Just on the last issue, the auditor concluded that the ministry has satisfactory systems and procedures in place to ensure that grants paid to the colleges are in accordance with funding policies.
In terms of accountability, on page 13, one of the expectations we have from the post-secondary advisory panel I referred to earlier is that through their work we can help shape more specific goals for the college system and to do so in a measurable fashion. That's one of the objectives we have from there, and we're hoping that over the coming year we can do better than we have in the past on that front.
On page 14, in terms of cooperation, clearly the fiscal restraints that the colleges have faced are driving greater potential for cooperation among institutions. You see some of the areas of potential cooperation listed there: programs, resources, some services and some administration.
There are a couple of things I can report we are doing in that area, one with respect to the funding formula. One of the observations in the auditor's report is that the funding formula has tended to drive enrolment growth rather than quality, and I think many of us have come to that conclusion. Certainly the college presidents are quite interested in changing the funding formula in a way that would reward quality as well as involvement. They are developing a proposal -- I met with them on this subject last week -- and we've agreed to continue working on that with a view to trying to build in a different system of rewards through the funding formula.
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There's a related issue in terms of sharing services. Again, the presidents have come to that conclusion as well. There are areas, for example in administrative services, where they would like to share information technology; they already do that on applications and admissions. Catriona King met with them last week on that subject as well, and I think we'll be in a position to do better on that within the coming year and record some progress.
Let me turn to the issue of governance. I'm on page 16. Here we talk about the role, the mandate and the powers of college boards of governors. I indicated earlier that much of this is spelled out in legislation and in regulation. The ministry does intend to work to provide a clear articulation of government's expectations of boards and how that fits into our overall accountability framework.
I want to note that the Council of Regents, the overall governing body for the boards of governors, is also working with boards and with presidents to address the issues that were raised with respect to holding presidents accountable for their own management. They have established a working group on presidential processes to look at particularly issues like annual performance reviews for each college president.
Let me report, very briefly, on the question of cooperation among colleges. There isn't a specific slide on this, but I'll flag a few things and we can talk about them further as we take questions.
One of the priorities the ministry has had for the past several years is to encourage more cooperation between colleges and universities. There are a number of institutions that have some specific progress they can report. I'll cite some examples.
Durham College has arrangements with York University, with Trent and with Ryerson to offer university programs in the Oshawa area, where there is no university, and directly link those two college programs offered by Durham so that people can take courses in their own community without having to travel to any of those university institutions. McMaster and Mohawk are developing a facility that will offer joint programs in health sciences in Hamilton. Seneca is building a new facility on the campus of York University, where there'll be joint programming in a number of science areas as well as in communications areas. There are a number of specific arrangements between institutions that are not on as large a scale but they are important signs of progress, and it's clearly an area where we'd like to do more.
In terms of the quality of college programs, I would certainly come to the same conclusion that the auditor's report came to. We have a number of processes in place to improve quality among college programs. We do not do as good a job as we need to on knitting those processes together. We have a process for approving new programs when they start. We have a process for setting standards. We have advisory boards for each program at each college that try to improve the quality and the relevance of the program at the individual college. But we don't have a good process for knitting those together into an overall improvement in the quality of college programs, and that's an area where we need to do better as well.
Let me sum up. I'm conscious of the time here. Clearly, we do have objectives for the college system: job-oriented programming, training people so they can get jobs when they graduate; we need to make the colleges as accessible as we can so that there is a space for students who are qualified and who are interested; we have to achieve resource efficiencies at the colleges as well as within the rest of the public sector; and we have to maintain their financial viability so that even as they face these challenges they do continue to be viable.
That's a snapshot of things we are doing. I leave it there and turn back to you.
The Vice-Chair: Is there anything else that Ms Hutcheon or Ms King would like to add? Thank you for that overview. We'll have about 10 minutes for each caucus for questions.
Mr Bill Grimmett (Muskoka-Georgian Bay): I'm interested in the issue of accountability and the references made to it in the auditor's report. First of all, could I have the date of that report, please? I can't find it in my materials.
Mr Erik Peters: It was tabled in the House on October 15, 1996.
Mr Grimmett: When would the ministry have first started working on that?
Mr Peters: From our perspective, I would say the final draft was around May 1996.
Mr Grimmett: But when would the Ministry of Education and Training have received it and started working on it?
Mr Peters: Probably in May when the final draft came out.
Mr Grimmett: With respect to accountability, Mr Trick, you spoke about the kinds of responsibilities that the individual boards have. It sounded like there was a lot of emphasis on the accountability of that board to the communities in which the college exists. Is there any accountability built into the system on those boards to the overall community of Ontario in their contemplation of the college's operation and performance?
Mr Trick: In raising the question you've hit on what I think is one of the fundamental changes the college system is going through. When the colleges were set up they were quite clearly thought of and referred to as "community colleges" and the boards were quite explicitly mandated to serve their communities. There is a Council of Regents, which is, if you like, an overseeing body for this system as a whole, designed to address directions for the Ontario community as a whole, as you put it, but I think there's recognition that this kind of governance structure has not done as much as it needs to in terms of serving the province as a whole.
Mr Grimmett: If I could get into the recommendations by the auditor, he's recommending in the report that the ministry establish some kind of system to track the performance and basically set up more accountability on a province-wide basis. What is your ministry doing in that regard and what kind of time lines do you have in mind for implementing a response to that recommendation?
Mr Trick: In terms of time lines, clearly the coming year is going to be a critical year. We will have in the middle of December a set of advice on new policy directions for both colleges and universities. As a government, the government will take on the task of determining, based on that advice and other sources of advice, what they see as the intended objectives of the college system. We'll have responsibility for setting out some measurable benchmarks in terms of how you measure whether you're achieving those objectives. All of those things I would see as key parts of our mission for the coming year.
Mr Grimmett: Could I ask you a little more specifically how you see that process developing? Do you see the colleges, on an individual basis, reporting back to you, to the ministry?
Mr Trick: In most areas the colleges report directly to the ministry on their progress, in that we fund them and we would expect them to report to us on progress, just as, for instance, the employment report is a report for the ministry. The Council of Regents has some specific responsibilities, notably with respect to collective bargaining, and there are obviously some areas there where the council has a very clear function.
Mr Grimmett: But you haven't answered the question. Do you see the individual colleges as reporting back to the ministry on these benchmarks, these standards you're trying to set?
Mr Trick: Yes.
Mr Grimmett: Would that information be made public?
Mr Trick: We would normally make it public. I haven't defined the information yet, but I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be.
Mr Gary Fox (Prince Edward-Lennox-South Hastings): The ministry referred to a working group developing guidelines concerning the process used to appoint, review and remove college presidents. Has this working group presented its recommendations?
Mr Trick: The working group is in progress, and I understand they're aiming now for early in the new year. That's their time frame.
Mr Bruce Crozier (Essex South): Good morning. I want to touch briefly on tuition. When you were on page 10 of your presentation, when you referred to tuition fees you made some reference to the student loan program. How are those loans dispersed to a student? If I qualify for $5,000 or whatever the figure might be, do I just get a cheque for that?
Mr Trick: The amount that you owe to the institution does not come to you in the form of a cheque, but your living costs do. That's paid once every academic term, say in September and again in January.
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Mr Crozier: I want to refer for a moment to the business plan. More specifically, in that business plan there is reference made to the fact that, "Over the next few months, each ministry will initiate discussions with their stakeholders and the general public, seeking comment on their business plans and proposed performance measures."
This business plan came out in May. Can you tell me what has transpired since May that would give me some information on those steps that I just mentioned?
Mr Trick: In the post-secondary sector, the key exercise that we are using to develop measures and to develop objectives for the system is through the advisory panel that we've set up. The panel is chaired by David Smith, who's the former principal of Queen's. It includes on it Fred Gorbet, who is a former Deputy Minister of Finance, David Cameron who is a professor at Dalhousie University, Catherine Henderson who's the president of Centennial College and Bette Stephenson, the former minister.
They have undertaken quite extensive consultations throughout the months of September and October where they have met directly with every college and every university in the province. In doing that, they've met not just with the presidents but also with representatives from faculty, from students. They have met with a broad range of public groups from outside the college and university sector. I'm thinking of business groups, some labour groups, community-based organizations and so on.
Through those consultations they have had what I think is probably the broadest process that we've gone through as a ministry in a number of years in this sector. They are now writing their report and it'll be available to us in December. Out of that exercise there has been very broad consultation on what people see as future directions. Of course, the briefs that people prepared -- and every institution and every group prepared a written brief -- are public documents and of course are available now to the ministry and to anybody else who wishes to see them.
Mr Crozier: When an advisory group such as that carries out its mandate -- travels the province, talks to people -- what part does ministry staff play in that process?
Mr Trick: There are a couple of roles that ministry staff would play. First of all, the panel itself has nine permanent staff who are all on loan to it from my division, so in a sense we provide the staff support to the panel itself. In terms of ministry staff participating in the consultations, I personally attended, I think, about 90% of all the consultation sessions as a member of the audience. As well, one or two of my staff would normally join me, not necessarily for the out-of-town sessions but the ones that were held here in Toronto. We participate as members of the audience in terms of listening to what people have to say, but we don't directly question the people making presentations.
Mr Crozier: Does your staff give any, I'll use the term, expert advice to the committee that may be part of their final report?
Mr Trick: We've provided a large amount of what I would call technical or background information for the committee in terms of where they want to know how current processes work or whether we can provide statistics on certain items. We provide a great deal of information to them. Of course, they have drawn on other sources as well by going directly to universities, to colleges, to other sources. But the short answer is yes.
Mr Crozier: At the same time, it's my information -- I'm going to ask you if it's correct or not -- that there was a government committee that almost paralleled this that was also holding some meetings. Are you aware of that?
Mr Trick: I am aware that they existed. One of the members introduced himself to me at one of the panel meetings. I really don't know very much about the process.
Mr Crozier: Okay. Then if you don't know much about the process, I assume none of your staff was involved in that kind of parallel group that was holding its hearings.
Mr Trick: That's correct. My understanding is that it was a function of the Progressive Conservative Party, so of course that would be separate from the ministry.
Mr Crozier: Also in your business plan there's a section that refers to key strategies, and it gives an example that of course "many ministries are moving away from delivering programs and services themselves. Where analysis proves that services can be protected and costs reduced, ministries are creating partnerships" etc, and you've spoken of some of the partnerships that you have. But I'm interested, since this is part of the ministry's business plan, can you tell us at this point if there are any areas in your ministry where they're moving away from delivering programs and services themselves?
Mr Trick: Let me speak specifically to the post-secondary sector. One of the distinguishing characteristics is that the ministry doesn't deliver those programs directly and of course hasn't. We either do it through colleges, which are crown agencies, or through universities, which exist as separate institutions under statute. There is a third vehicle of course, which are private vocational schools, which we regulate but which obviously are private. In that sense we have fully moved to that model in that part of education.
The additional responsibility I have with respect to OSAP is also one where for many years we've worked in partnership with banks. When you get a student loan, you do not get it from the ministry directly but you go to a bank. They raise the float and they administer the collections process, repayment process after you graduate. So in that sense too there's quite a full partnership where most of the actual implementation of the program is done by the banks or the financial institutions.
Mr Crozier: But the government fully guarantees those loans.
Mr Trick: We do.
Mr Crozier: Or does the government fully guarantee those loans?
Mr Trick: We guarantee those loans, yes.
Mr Crozier: So the banks are more carrying out an administrative process than actually loaning the money.
Mr Trick: The banks raise the money; they lend it. If the student fails to pay it back, we have guaranteed the loans and we are obligated then to reimburse the banks. But the actual process of going out and borrowing money from somewhere so that you can lend it to the student is done by the banks.
Mr Crozier: The government then pays the interest on that loan during its interest-free period?
Mr Trick: Yes. There's an interest-free period while the student is in school, and then after graduation, the student starts paying interest.
Mr Crozier: Can you give me some idea of the amount that's in float then in student loans that the government's responsible for?
Mr Trick: The amount that we will lend out this year will be approximately $1.4 billion or $1.5 billion to students.
Mr Crozier: Million?
Mr Trick: Billion, with a B. That's the amount that will be lent to students for their education and living expenses in the current fiscal year.
Mr Tony Martin (Sault Ste Marie): I've looked at all the documentation and the material that has been produced over the last year and a half about the post-secondary education system, and it seems to me it's certainly strong on the issue of moving to more accountability and ability to measure outcomes but very weak in describing where the college or university system fits in a larger vision of this province as we move into the next century and the role it will play in that.
It seems to me from my past experience that colleges and universities were seen by communities as much more than just vehicles to take somebody from primary or secondary education into the workforce or to help somebody who wants to change from one career to another. They were vehicles of economic development. They were tools to assess trends and they were much larger than just places where people went and took courses.
How can those of us who continue to see colleges and universities as much more than that be helpful in making sure they continue to be the vehicle that they were imagined when they were first instituted and that they were evolving into, and have now come to sort of a crossroads? Is there anything out there, any kind of blueprint into which the business plan fits the thinking that you're doing?
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For example, the Vision 2000 exercise was one that I thought included the whole community and was very much interested in making sure that students who came to college would be able to fit into the larger vision of community that many people who participated in that exercise had. Is there anything out there now at all of a blueprint nature that this very narrow business plan fits into?
Mr Trick: In terms of, is there something today?, the answer is, I think, nothing in particular that would fit the description you're talking about. One of the reasons we asked the advisory panel to take a look at these questions is to help us frame some specific goals for the college system, and let me just speak directly to colleges at the moment. We can get into universities if you like.
In terms of colleges, one of the big issues that is often debated in that sector, is how broad should the role of colleges be? There is a community role. There is very clearly a training role, training for employment very quickly after graduation. There are accessibility issues. To what extent are colleges expected to take in very large numbers of people who would not otherwise be ready for post-secondary education and make them ready so that they can benefit from college programs? There are economic development roles, and really one of the fundamental issues the panel is dealing with is, how broad is the role of colleges? It's clearly an area where we have to provide some clarification.
Mr Martin: It seems to me, and I don't think anybody would disagree, that Ontario is a jurisdiction that is envied by many around the world as a place that would be lovely to live in and to work in, and in fact over the years businesses have chosen, in spite of some of the roadblocks that some might see, where they are to come and invest and develop opportunities for them to make money and to create employment.
It seems to me that over the years, through various governments, we have had an evolution of things. One of the really important pieces of that was the introduction of the community college system, which picked up a whole group of people who were falling through the cracks, who weren't getting the kind of education they needed before that because they couldn't go to university. It was I think identified that simply high school education wasn't enough anymore, so there was this piece put in and we began to see a whole lot of activity.
I know myself that in some of the communities that I worked in, Elliot Lake and Wawa and Sault Ste Marie up in the north, the college was very much a part of everything that was going on, that spoke of growth and health and people being involved and making sure we were picking up people who were kind of floating out there, not knowing where they fit, and all those kinds of things. I just don't see that any more in the same way and I know that the effort to try in the last couple of years to meld colleges and universities -- there's a lot of work done in that area.
I know in my own community a grass-roots organization sprang up called Bridges that, as a ministry, we funded. It tied together Lake Superior State University across the river with Algoma University College, with Sault College to develop some new programs that responded to some of what we thought were the potential directions we could go in as a community, develop new industry that people could work in and enjoy and that would contribute to the quality of life in the community.
But as we take away from these systems and as we narrow the focus of what these systems will do with business plans and being more businesslike and the demand for accountability and measurement tools above all else, we're losing the essence of these institutions. Again, I worry that even though we have a business plan, this business plan does not fit into anything larger that speaks to, for me, where we're going to be in the year 2000, 2010, for my four children as they move into the system.
A few months ago we had a couple of students here, when the minister was before us in the standing committee on estimates. They were halfway through a social work program. I notice by your graph here that in the social work area now people are finding less and less opportunity to work in the field they're trained in. These two students were from Sheridan. They were asking the minister, through me: At this point in time, with the downsizing of government and the diminishing of opportunity that used to be there in the areas of health, social services, education -- they're halfway through a program -- they're wondering if there's going to be a job for them at the end of the line; if they should continue along that path or if in fact they should change and do something else, and what that something else would be.
I thought we were moving in a direction, with the OTAB initiative, that would have communities involved in deciding where the new industry was going to be, where the new jobs were going to be. That again has fallen into a big black hole somewhere. I don't know where it is. In my community, I used to know who was active in the development of the committees and what was going to happen. That's gone now. Can you elaborate on that for me any further? Can you help me understand how this fits into that, if there is a that, and how I talk to students when I meet them about what it is they should be doing re their future and how helpful the college or university system is going to be to them in that?
I knocked on probably over 300 doors two weeks ago when I was back in my constituency for constituency week. People were concerned about two things primarily: One was the impact on the health care system of the cuts this government is imposing, and two was, if they had children, particularly if they were already well on their way through the secondary system or into the post-secondary system, what was going to be there for them; first, were they going to be able to afford to finish, and second, when they did, would they have a job?
There's lots of anxiety out there. There are a lot of good people who want to participate, who want to have their particular skill, ability, enthusiasm about an area appreciated and recognized, and to use it, but they don't know where that fits any more. They don't know where the college and university system fits any more in that bigger picture of where we're going together as a community of people.
Mr Trick: Let me just make a couple of observations. I hope these will put a bit of context here. From the time when Premier Davis established the first objectives for the college system in 1965, when he was Minister of Education, one of the objectives he laid out was that the college system should serve not just people fresh out of high school but people who either had not finished high school or who were older and needed to come back to post-secondary education. In that sense, I think the original vision of the colleges was and continues to be that they will serve quite a diverse group of people in the community and not strictly recent graduates. The figures I was showing earlier with respect to the fact that only 38% of new applicants this year are coming immediately from high school I think reflect the fact that for every part of the college system, that's a very crucial role.
In the Sault in particular, the relationship between Sault College and Algoma University College and the institution in Michigan is something that both the president of Sault College and the president of Algoma have talked to me about in some detail. It's an excellent example of a particular role that a college and a university college can play, particularly in a smaller community where there aren't a lot of resources they can draw on from the immediate vicinity. From my perspective, that's a clear example of some of the things you're talking about.
If you look at other types of communities, particularly the colleges in Metro, the areas immediately around Metro, they don't perform precisely that type of role. Perhaps you don't expect them to, because there are different sets of resources around and the focus on serving a particular type of student is somewhat stronger. One might look to a future where there are different roles for different colleges, depending on what is the specific need of their community.
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That doesn't address all of the problems you mentioned. Clearly the macroeconomic situation, the labour market, are something that colleges don't control directly but have to work in that environment. If they don't respond effectively in that environment, then that's a problem we need to deal with, but there are lots of different ways that a college can serve a community.
Mr Grimmett: I'll return to the Provincial Auditor's recommendations. In the recommendations, the auditor has indicated that he would like to see more relevance between the programs put out by colleges and the labour market demand that's out there.
I've been surprised actually, as I go around to the factories and operations in my riding, to see the number that are related to the auto industry -- because I'm 100 miles north of Toronto -- and also the degree of sophistication in those operations. I'm told by people who run them that they have difficulty in Ontario finding the technicians, especially in computer design of auto parts and auto-related manufacturing. A lot of them have to go to Europe to find these people.
Do you see the ministry taking a leadership role to either force or encourage colleges to make these programs more available and perhaps to move away from some of the programs that you mentioned, which appear to be overstocked with students considering the lack of demand in the marketplace?
Mr Trick: The short answer is yes. I think as we do a better job of measuring the results of the colleges and trying to use those measures to shape what colleges do, we clearly have to respond as closely as we can to what the labour market needs. The particular issue you're raising, that we have shortages in one field and surpluses in another, is something that you would want to try to iron out.
In saying that, I guess I'm cautious in terms of what you might call central planning of the labour market. Clearly there has to be a role for free choice, for students to take some responsibility for their own careers and for employers to make their needs known. That kind of matching you would expect to happen through the private sector rather than through bureaucrats making decisions. With that caution in mind, I nevertheless would agree with your fundamental point.
Mr Grimmett: I think there is an expectation on the part of the public that the provincial government would take some initiative in that area. That's my own sense. There is a question I get from time to time as to why schools are turning out graduates in areas where there simply aren't likely going to be jobs for the foreseeable future. In that regard I'd ask you whether you see the provincial government perhaps taking a look at the number of community colleges out there and assessing whether or not it's necessary that there be so many of them offering courses, as an example, in nursing or law enforcement, or whatever that course is generally called.
Mr Trick: Law and security.
Mr Grimmett: Law and security, yes. Do you see the provincial government taking a stronger role in that regard?
Mr Trick: I think we'd like to improve the responsiveness of the system to what the labour market actually needs. Nursing is an example where the number of new entries into nursing has come down quite considerably over the last two years. It was close to 3,000 a year, and this year I understand the figure is about 1,500. It's also a good example of a field where shortages and surpluses have been fairly constant over the years. It's proven very difficult to calibrate precisely how many nurses you will need and make sure that you get precisely that number. Nevertheless, with that caution in mind, I think you're talking about a direction we'd like to see.
Mr Grimmett: Have you seen the lack of supply through your ministry of the computer design technicians and the need for them in the marketplace? Are you aware of that?
Mr Trick: Yes.
Mr Grimmett: Are there currently steps being taken by the marketplace through the colleges to increase the capacity for students in that area?
Mr Trick: One of the things we need to be sure we do there is to provide a funding formula that rewards people for serving the specific labour market needs when they are identified. Obviously it's been a very transitional year for the college sector in terms of dealing with the kind of restraints we've had to deal with all across the public sector, but as that situation stabilizes, the reward structure is clearly what needs to be calibrated.
Mr Fox: On that issue, the trend today has to change to job skills training, to what's needed out there. Does the workplace approach you or are you trying to approach the workplace to get the training in place for the needs of the future?
Mr Trick: The largest amount of interaction there takes place at the college level. Every college president hears from employers in his or her community saying, "These are the kinds of graduates we need, and we either are happy with what you're supplying us in terms of those graduates or sometimes we're not happy." So most of the interaction there takes place at the college level, sometimes through the president, sometimes through advisory groups that exist for each program. For instance, an advisory group for a certain program will say, "Look, this program is not as relevant as it should be and we need to change the program," or sometimes even saying, "Look, there's no further need for this program in this community," and so programs are cancelled. Most of it takes place at that level.
Mr Fox: I have talked extensively to the president of Loyalist College, which is in my next riding. They would like to see a different approach to this, because they feel education could be funded through different industries by the job skills training that could be provided. Has there been any consultation on that at all?
Mr Trick: Could you tell me a little more about what you mean by that in terms of funding by the job skill trades?
Mr Fox: By the employers out there, the companies that are looking for people trained in specific markets or technology. The thing is, that's not really happening, they feel. They think there's a market out there and they could get specific funding for this from the marketplace if the job skills training were more in the direction that they would like to have employees trained.
Mr Trick: I think that's clearly a direction that is going to be a lot more prominent in the future than it is today. I've talked to the president of Loyalist about this as well and I think we had quite a good discussion on it. Every college today does some what you might call contract training or fee-for-service training, where an employer comes to them and says, "We would like you to train our employees to do such-and-such." It might be a one-week course, it could be a month; it's whatever the employer actually needs.
As colleges become less reliant on government resources, of course, both the incentive and the potential for going directly to private employers and offering training on that basis increases. It's something that I think as a ministry we want to do what we can to encourage. I've heard in some cases that people felt that either as a ministry we didn't support that or that we had regulations that were standing in their way. So I've asked them quite specifically to tell us what we can do to make that happen a little more easily, because it's clearly a great source of revenue for the college and a source of training for the community.
Mr Jim Flaherty (Durham Centre): I want to ask you a bit about tuitions, if I may, in post-secondary education. I've seen the business plan: "Without placing an undue burden on the taxpayers of Ontario, a new financial aid model for post-secondary students will be developed with the federal government to ensure access for qualified students." I understand the role of government in providing some financial assistance to people. What I'm wondering about is whether the ministry has a plan with respect to encouraging parents and students to save for post-secondary education. We're all familiar with the education saving plans that are available now which provide some potential source of funds for tuitions in colleges and universities. Has the ministry approached that subject?
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Mr Trick: We have not yet directly approached that subject, although I don't want to say it's not of interest to us. A number of the presentations that the advisory panel heard this fall raised exactly that question. As we go to a system where students are expected to pay a greater share of the cost of the education that they benefit from, clearly it puts more onus on students and their families to save in advance for that. My sense is that many of them would like to do so but they recognize, as you point out, that the existing tax structure doesn't give them any particular incentive to do that.
The registered education savings plans were changed this year to increase the amounts you can put in every year, so you can put in $2,000 for each child in your family every year, but the actual tax benefit you receive from that is essentially nil for the parent. The benefit to the parent is strictly that the interest on the RESP is not taxable until it's actually taken out by the student, but the amount you put in is not deductible. I'm sure, in raising the question, you're aware of that.
Mr Flaherty: It's taxable at the student's marginal rate.
Mr Trick: Yes, which one hopes would be much lower than the parent's. But that obviously remains to be seen.
There's also clearly uncertainty to the parent. If the child chooses not to go to college or university, the parent gets his or her money back, but not the interest.
Mr Flaherty: Perhaps I can just ask you what the ministry sees ahead. In overall figures now -- I can probably tell from the reports, but maybe you can tell me more quickly -- what percentage of tuitions now are paid by loans, I suppose, and what percentage are paid by students from their own resources or their parents' resources?
Mr Trick: I mentioned that about one third -- oh, I'm sorry. Students versus their parents?
Mr Flaherty: Public versus private money.
Mr Trick: Roughly one third of college students this year, looking at both full-time and part-time, are receiving OSAP, which is an indication of the OSAP money being used to pay tuition first and then living costs second. I'm not sure I have the numbers that would answer your question more directly than that, but we could see if we could find a more precise answer.
Mr Flaherty: My next question was going to be where you are going in the future with this. What do you see happening in terms of who pays for post-secondary education? I take it you see it increasing from where it is now; that is, that the role of government funds will be lower.
Mr Trick: This is a question we've put quite directly to the advisory panel, so I don't know that the government will establish a future direction until we hear their advice. Clearly the share of the cost of education the students are paying has increased over the past year as we increased tuition on both the college and university sides. But in terms of future directions, I guess I'd have to hold off till the government establishes that direction.
Mr Flaherty: You mentioned Durham College earlier, which is an institution that we're proud of in Durham region. When the community colleges report financially to the ministry, do you perform any sort of audit function on them in cases where there is not a deficit problem?
Mr Trick: Where there is no deficit, the college itself is obligated under the statute -- the board of governors is obligated -- to have the books audited by a chartered accountant. If they are not in a deficit position, they don't need the ministry's approval, although of course we want them to report to us on their financial circumstances.
One of the things I have done in the past couple of weeks and in response to the Provincial Auditor's report was to meet with the presidents about standardizing their financial reporting. There have been a number of practices where one college was doing something differently from another, particularly in the area of accrual of severance costs and other restructuring costs. So we had that discussion. As well, we talked about putting budgets on the same basis as audited financial statements so that when people set a plan at the beginning of the year, it looks something like the report they get at the end of the year, whether they met the targets. So we went through that discussion and there was agreement that colleges will do that starting with the fiscal year starting April 1, and we're now fine-tuning some of the details with them. For every college, we do take an interest in their audited financial statements.
The Acting Chair (Mr Bruce Crozier): Could we move on. Mr Colle.
Mr Mike Colle (Oakwood): Just a few questions. First of all, you made an interesting comment in reference to Mr Grimmett's question about what you do about students who keep enrolling in programs that don't offer any employment prospects, like nursing etc. Your answer was that we should rely more on the free choice of the students and not in any way try to interfere with that and let the market take place. But I find that a lot of students are basically unaware or unrealistic in terms of what job prospects are. In other words, they have this romantic view of what they'd like to do but very few of them have done any in-depth analysis, nor have their families, in terms of what their real prospects are as a result of taking a course in early childhood education.
Given the dramatic needs in other areas and the developing trends in other areas, don't you think it would be advisable for the ministry to maybe develop a disincentive program or some kind of incentive program to essentially tell these students and their families the facts of life, that if they enter into an early childhood education program, the likelihood of their getting meaningful employment at a certain wage is basically remote?
Mr Trick: Let me, if I may, restate my earlier answer. I believe that by setting objectives for the college system in terms of placing students in jobs that are relevant to their training, we're going to improve the share of students who actually do get jobs in their own field. It was in qualifying that that I said I didn't want bureaucratic decisions to replace students' choices and employers' choices. So we don't want to have no room for students and employers to express what they see as the future for themselves, but I don't mean to deny that we ought to do better in terms of those placements.
Some of the questions you're raising there relate to high school guidance functions and the information we provide to students at that level. I frankly am not an expert in that field. Did you want to speak to that?
Ms Hutcheon: Yes, just to mention that those are exactly the kinds of issues we are in consultation on now in secondary school reform. As you may know, we've been out in communities across Ontario and those very issues that you raise are ones that are coming to the fore in terms of how we might change the secondary school system to be able to make those decisions earlier on in terms of improved guidance and partnerships with employers in a cooperative sense. So it is being looked at through the secondary school reform as well.
Mr Colle: I appreciate that. The only thing I'm concerned about too is, isn't there a bit of a conflict in terms of the colleges' position in that they're advertising and trying to attract students? In fact, they're in competition for students sometimes. What is the incentive for them to say, "Don't come into our college and take nursing, because of the job prospects"? Do they do that? Do they sit down before a student applies and does the college have any direction to essentially lay out the reality of employment prospects with a young person who might come in for nursing?
Mr Trick: In terms of whether they do it one on one, I think it depends very much on whether the student approaches the college rather than vice versa. But let me take it up a little to sort of management actions there. A couple of colleges did shut down their nursing programs this year permanently because of the question of employment prospects for their graduates. Others have reduced their intake. As I mentioned, the total number of new entrants this year is about half of what it was a couple of years ago. In that sense there is responsiveness both because students can see what's happening and because colleges have reduced their programs accordingly. So that does go on. What we need to do is try to improve the reward structure so that it goes in a more efficient way and that there is a better reward to the college for offering programs where students get placed in their field.
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Mr Colle: Okay, but there's no mechanism in place to be sort of preventive rather than reactive in terms of analysing market trends and saying, "This is a directive that we should be aware of in terms of what's happening in the job market for a specific field"? It's more done essentially on an ad hoc basis right now.
Mr Trick: I think colleges are being preventive in the sense that when they reduce their intake for these programs, which is what I'm describing, that is preventing a graduate from coming out three years from now who is unlikely to get a job in his or her field, if that's nursing, but it's done on a program basis rather than the ministry declaring that certain fields are open or shut. There are a relatively small number of health care programs where we specifically have quotas on the total number of people going through, but that's not characteristic of the whole system.
Mr Colle: To move to another area, you mention the situation at York University, where a branch of Seneca is going in. One of the trends I've noticed is that there are a lot of students who may have completed university and then are going back to college to get more specialized degrees. There seems to be more of a blurring of responsibilities in areas of study and course material between universities and colleges. I know there are traditionally two distinct areas which I guess the auditor is saying there should be more cooperation between in terms of credits being transferred etc.
With the dramatic changes that are taking place in the workplace -- I give the example of the high demand for animation technologists at Sheridan, and I think Seneca just opened up a school also -- what is studied in post-secondary education is no longer definable as being, "This is college and this is university." I don't know whether in Vision 2000 they looked at possibly doing a dramatic shift in identifying this blurring and saying perhaps what should happen is that a college or a university in a community should in essence offer both alternatives to students so that you don't have this ongoing conflict with credits, accreditation etc, and the ability of students to go from a highly specialized technological area into a more philosophical, university approach discipline.
Is that one of the approaches of the Vision 2000 exercise or is that being looked at as something that may happen?
Mr Trick: I think the answer is that, yes, this is something we're seeing more of today and we're probably going to see more of in the future. I think of some of the specific things we're doing at present, simple things like publishing a guide as to what college programs are recognized at what universities and vice versa so that a student can understand if he gets into a certain college program how far that might take him towards a university degree in future if that's what he or she chooses to do.
We have established a consortium of colleges and universities to try to increase the number of joint college-university programs that are available. That consortium is chaired by Dr Tim Easley from Lambton College and Dr Dave Marshall, who is president of Nipissing University, and there are a number of colleges and universities represented on it.
As a ministry, we have dedicated some funding so we can essentially help start up some individual programs that will increase the choices available to students.
In dealing with this issue, one of the fundamental things we run up against is that we have a long history of colleges that were clearly set up not to interact with universities, and vice versa. Everything about the college system has been set up for the student who goes to college and does not go to university. I'm thinking of things like transfer arrangements, funding arrangements, admission requirements. There are certain admission requirements to get into a college program, but they wouldn't necessarily get you into a university program. All of these things have to be dealt with one by one before you have a more integrated system than we have. I don't want to minimize the challenges that are there, but there is progress we're trying to make.
Mr Colle: Would it be feasible for the ministry to do a long-range analysis of perhaps establishing a pilot project of a hybrid-type college-university to see how you could integrate the two areas and the disciplines they take to see whether it can be done so that we avoid a lot of the complications we're seeing in the system? I think they make the system inefficient and confusing to the students. My sense, as a person who's an observer now, and I've got children in and out of all of them, is that we're into a real transitional phase where there's this difficulty in someone saying: "I can just go to university. I'll be okay." You can't do that anymore.
Friends of my sons and daughters have gone to university; they go to Sheridan, they go to Ryerson. My own daughter, that's what she did. She got her BA and then went to Ryerson and did the two-year post-graduate course at Ryerson. It seems that everybody is now being forced to do something beyond university, and then the college students are being forced to go back and upgrade and specialize. But I just wonder whether it might be possible to look at maybe, whether it be York University or Durham College or somewhere, setting up perhaps a pilot project to see how this might work as a future model and to use this as a way of testing this model for future integration and blending of some of these functions. I don't know whether the ministry has looked at that or whether that's a feasible sort of undertaking.
The Acting Chair: Can we have a quick answer so I can then move on to Mr Martin, please.
Mr Trick: Just very briefly, there are a number of different types of institutions one could set up. The progress that we've come to so far is, for example, to provide funding for colleges to locate on university campuses. I mentioned a couple of examples of that, the president of Durham bringing universities into his college. We have not gone to the next step of having an integrated institution. Whether we could get there, I frankly don't know at this point.
Mr Martin: I want to continue on, if I can, the train of questioning and thought that I was into before, which is this business of narrowing the role and the effect of colleges and universities to almost a business, the business of taking people who are either coming out of secondary school or coming out of the labour market without a job and fashioning them into something that then business can use, again, in a more appropriate way, hopefully for everybody concerned, and that in fact colleges and universities, like so much else that government offers, are much more than that.
If you look at the history of universities, there's always been an argument about their relative usefulness in society. Universities have been criticized by some as airy-fairy, theoretical discussion of all kinds of things that really have no practical use, when at the end of the day we know, in looking back over time, that that's just not true, that some of the great thought of our time and some of the great ideas come out of that kind of free flow of ideas.
It seems to me that when colleges were introduced it was imagined that they would perform a somewhat similar function for a different group of people, a place where people could come and find out what they're good at, through a variety of means, and interact with the community around what the community would like them to be doing. But we're moving away from that, and that bothers me somewhat because I think it will diminish the quality of life and the attractiveness of this jurisdiction, if you want to look at it from a business sense, to businesses which want to come in and invest, because really business is attracted to Ontario particularly because of the excellent education system we have in place. I don't think anybody would argue with that. That in fact is what the government is selling when it goes outside of Ontario, this wonderful education system we have.
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They talk about the health care system we have in place, which we sometimes have a hard time measuring, but we know that it provides for businesses which come and invest here an advantage over other jurisdictions where health care is much more expensive. Health care, of course, is not only an advantage to business but it's something that we as a community of people in Ontario and Canada value, something that makes us Canadian. Now it's becoming more and more that. It used to be the railroad that connected us; now more and more it's becoming the health care system and things like that. Those kinds of systems are, in my mind, difficult to fit into this box of, you know, does it follow the accepted business practice of the day, is it measurable, is it accountable, all those kinds of things.
I present for your scrutiny, because I'm going to table it after, an article that was written by a management consultant who teaches at McGill University. He calls the article "The Myth of Society Inc." This is one of the world's leading management thinkers, who refutes the argument that the private sector can serve as a model for society and that government should be more businesslike.
I'll just read a small piece of it, and I am hoping that you will take it and have a look at it, because it's actually very good. It was actually shared with me by the CEO of the biggest corporation in our community. He has some concern about the drift he sees in government today, trying to be more like business, when he believes as well that government is government and business is business and there are different principles at play in each and we need to recognize that and not, as we seem to be doing these days, characterize everything that's public and government as bad and everything that's private and business as good. There's lots that we can take from each other, and there's lots that is different. I would suggest to you, who are in a very responsible position in the Ministry of Education and Training, that we need to have some people who are in this process of evaluating and determining where we are going remembering this and keeping this in mind.
It says here: "Next, consider the myth of measurement, an ideology embraced with almost religious fervour by the management movement. What is its effect in government? Things have to be measured, to be sure, especially costs. But how many of the real benefits of government activities lend themselves to such measurement? Some rather simple and directly delivered ones do -- especially at the municipal level -- such as garbage collection. But what about the rest? Robert McNamara's famous planning, programming and budgeting systems in the US federal government failed for this reason: Measurement often missed the point, sometimes causing awful distortions. (Remember the body counts of Vietnam?) How many times do we have to come back to this one until we finally give up? Many activities are in the public sector precisely because of measurement problems. If everything were so crystal clear and every benefit so easily attributable, those activities would have been in the private sector long ago."
I just give you, as a practical example, some of the damage that's being done to some of the communities I feel very close to because of the very fast and narrow decision-making that's going on at this point in time re our college system in particular. Places like Chapleau and Wawa and Hornepayne, that used to have the presence of a very vital and viable college system, however small compared to the larger entities that you know of down here, those colleges became, at some times and in some ways, the very heartbeat of those communities, because that's where people gathered. They would come together from various sectors of that community to learn something and, in that learning, to talk about the future of the community, and often new ideas and new things flowed out of that. Those small entities now, if they're not gone already, are in danger of disappearing.
I invite some comment from you regarding that. If we're going to follow strictly a businesslike management approach to things, then those vehicles will not exist any more, in my mind. If we see the delivery of government services as something more than that, and sometimes almost intangible and immeasurable, then perhaps they will survive. Where are we heading with the planning that's going on right now, in your mind, and is there any possibility at all that some of this will survive?
Mr Trick: Just briefly, in raising those comments, you raise some important questions about how we manage in a way that doesn't lose important things about the system which may not be leaping out as things we can measure. How do we measure things that are less tangible, even to the point of measuring things that are somewhat intangible in terms of community values and so on? I don't have a particular answer to that today, but I am interested in the article you mentioned, and I'd be glad to read it.
Mr Martin: This probably isn't a question I should be asking you, but I'm going to ask it anyway. How do I explain to people in places like Wawa, Chapleau and Hornepayne, who have come to see the presence of the college in their community as one of the vital pieces, like the hospital and the post office, of what makes that community a community and gives it some sense of hope that maybe there is a place we can gather and learn and bring new ideas to the table so that we might develop a community economic development plan that will see us into the next century, that will see the people there now continue to have jobs and be able to live and enjoy a quality of life that we've all come to sometimes take for granted in this province, how do I explain to them what's there for -- a lot of them would like their children to come back and work and live in their community. But the more we see things like the college system disappearing, the more they feel, "Well, I guess it's just not in the cards," and that, for me, is really sad.
We'll see some of those very vibrant communities not be there any more five, 10 or 20 years down the road. Those people will move to places like Metro, where they will get lost because it's just a new world down here. It's a different culture altogether. What do I say to those folks about what we're doing here and what you're doing in your ministry, and how can I offer them any sense of hope in the future?
Mr Trick: Without claiming to be an expert on the individual communities that you mentioned, clearly in the context of the funding situation that we faced across the public sector and in the college system this past year, a lot of college presidents have had to make some very difficult decisions about which communities they can continue to have a permanent presence in and which not. I know the president of Sault College and presidents of all the northern colleges in particular have spent a great deal of time trying to determine how they can serve a big geographic area with the funding that's available. In many cases, they've had to make some very tough judgement calls.
I don't have a particular solution for the circumstances you mention, but I do appreciate the important role they play in the community.
Mr Martin: I guess what worries me even more is that this thinking that is closing down these very vital elements in places like Chapleau, Wawa and Hornepayne may at some point come and take in Sault Ste Marie as well. We have a college there that used to, at one time in its history, belong to Cambrian College. It was determined over time that it made more sense that we would have our own so that it would more clearly reflect some of the thinking in our community, because we're different from Sudbury and we have different sets of resources and abilities and things that we depend on for our livelihood.
Is there anything out there by way of a benchmark that will tell you when what you're doing, what presidents are doing in making the decisions foisted on them, in my opinion, by strictly financial considerations, is there something that you will be able to recognize as a red flag when all of this becomes counterproductive?
Are there any plans or any thoughts around the question of amalgamating, for example, Sault College with Cambrian College and taking away some of the function that we now do in Sault Ste Marie and moving it over there, which would take away very significantly from, again, the vitality and the very independent nature and the excitement that we have about the future in my community? Should I be worried about that? Is that something I should concern myself about? Is that something I should be going back and talking to the people in Sault Ste Marie about as we move more and more towards this model of superefficiency and cost accountability and all those kinds of things and away from the sometimes immeasurable contribution that a college and a university make to a particular area?
The Acting Chair: I'm sorry to say that we are now past 12 of the clock. I see the Speaker is up, so we're probably going to have to vacate shortly anyway. I would like to thank you on behalf of the committee for coming today. Next week, we will have some Ministry of Education and Training people back again, I think, perhaps some different people, and we'll be dealing with section 308, which is OTAB. Thank you.
There's no further business. This committee is adjourned.
The committee adjourned at 1201.