What is the right size for McGill?


JOHN DEALY | In recent years several University reports and study documents have addressed the issue of the appropriate size for the McGill of the twenty-first century. However, there has been no wide discussion of this question, and no detailed analysis of various scenarios has been conducted.

In developing a strategy to serve as a basis for addressing the serious challenges now facing the University, it is important to arrive at some consensus on the issue of the proper size for the University. The present comments are my contribution to the debate on this matter.

These views are based on my general feeling for the relationships between the variables, but I believe that objective analyses could be carried out to test their validity. It is very important for us to assemble the data required and carry out these analyses.

Cost of instruction

In the case of laboratory courses, studios and other intensive modes of instruction, the costs, in terms of equipment, supervision and space required, all go up roughly in proportion to the number of students. Thus, the cost per marginal additional student is higher in science, engineering and other professional disciplines than in disciplines where lecture courses are the norm. And McGill has a larger proportion of its students in these high-cost programs than any other Canadian university.

In the case of lecture courses, the cost per student does not go up in direct proportion to the number of students in a program, and this suggests that increasing numbers will increase efficiency. However, unless we start sectioning courses, which will increase costs substantially, the quality of instruction will go down. At the same time, large classes and heavy teaching loads will make academic positions at McGill less attractive.

Our most valuable asset

Surveys that have been conducted among newly registered engineering undergraduates in recent years indicate that by far the strongest reason for choosing McGill is the reputation of the University.

Certainly the figures in Maclean's magazine and from other sources show that in many areas, what we have to offer compares poorly with our peer institutions. Thus, our reputation is our most valuable asset, and our ability to attract outstanding applicants, particularly from outside Quebec, relies almost entirely on this factor.

We must do everything we can to protect and enhance our reputation. Any degradation of the quality of instruction and quality of life for students hurts our reputation and we must therefore avoid such degradation.

Increasing the size of the student body without a concomitant increase in staff and facilities will inevitably reduce the quality of instruction and life for students. Likewise, reductions in staff and facilities for a fixed size of student body will have the same effect.

Physical plant cost

McGill faces an ever-increasing accumulation of severe building maintenance problems. This results from a maintenance budget that is entirely inadequate in the light of the fact that many of our buildings are old, inefficient and expensive to maintain. The inadequacy of the annual maintenance budget means that this "accumulated debt" to our buildings can only continue to grow.

How can we escape this spiral? Obtaining the several hundreds of millions of dollars needed to restore all these buildings to good health, and increasing our annual maintenance budget to keep them in good repair, are outside the realm of possibility.

Thus, whereas we are making significant progress in paying off our bank debt, we will never be able to "repay" what we owe to our buildings. The only alternative is to vacate buildings that are in bad repair, inefficient, expensive to maintain, and not architecturally important components of the campus.

How can we do without them? One approach is to replace them with new, larger, more efficient, modern buildings. However, even after a herculean effort by hundreds of dedicated volunteers and campaign staffers, the recent Twenty-First Century Fund Campaign only succeeded in raising sufficient funds for part of one significant new building.

The struggle continues to obtain funds for buildings for music, law and student services, but we will not be able to solve our building problem in this manner. In any event, we are always left with the problem of annual maintenance. The only other alternative is to operate a smaller university, drawing back into a complex of buildings that we can afford to maintain.

Fixed and variable income

At the same time, the provincial grant per marginal additional student is substantially less than the average cost per student. Compared with this "variable income," our "fixed income," i.e., gifts and endowment income, does not tend to go up with enrolment.

One might think that the more students we graduate, the more gifts we will ultimately receive from alumni. However, this effect is offset to a significant degree by the decrease in the quality of the students' experience at McGill as class sizes increase. The proof of this is that our biggest donors are from our smallest programs, and vice versa.

Thus, as our enrolment increases, our fixed income per student goes down as does the quality of instruction. Obviously there is a limit to this process, but at the present time, nearly all of our programs have significantly higher teaching loads and lower costs per student than our peer institutions. There is no question that many students  and their parents  now perceive that McGill is not providing a quality of education that matches Canada's other first-rate universities.

Our applicant pool

In any event, it seems foolhardy to adopt either maintaining or increasing the student body as our policy because: a) the applicant pool from our prime geographic area, Quebec, is shrinking with no sign of a reversal, and b) the number of applications from outside Quebec is quite volatile  subject to fads and the whim of applicants who have many universities to choose from. We could dramatically increase our efforts to recruit students outside Quebec, but this would be costly, and the only place for the funds to come from is the operating budget, further eroding the resources available for instruction.

And what will it profit us in the long run to fill up the University with students, many of whom are not going to have good experiences at McGill and will thus go out into the world as unsatisfied clients who will not support the University in the future and who will tarnish our reputation?

Effect of student fees

It has become painfully clear that it will not be possible for McGill to maintain its position as a university with an international reputation, based on the income available from government grants and student fees at their present levels. The choices are to let McGill descend quickly into second-class status or to increase our operating income. The only obvious way to produce a stable increase in annual income is by increasing student fees. This will most certainly have the effect of reducing the number of applicants.

Naturally we will wish to maintain a good level of enrolment by Canada's most outstanding young people, and we can do this by means of a scholarship program funded through private donations. However, we must plan for a smaller student body.

Balancing graduate enrolment

It is important to note that McGill's internal funding formula gives a higher relative rating to doctoral studies than the formula used by Quebec to calculate university grants. This means that the University's policy is to encourage an emphasis on our most expensive level of education, while we are not compensated for this increased cost by correspondingly higher income from grants and student fees. Thus we are transferring resources from the undergraduate to graduate degree programs.

There are two mechanisms for reducing the number of graduate students at McGill, and both have their merits. First, we can reduce the time it takes for a student to complete his or her studies. Students who remain in their programs beyond the minimum residency requirement earn no grant income for the University. At the present time, rather few graduate students receive their degrees within this time limit. In addition to reducing the grant funds received per student in program, the long duration of graduate studies reduces the competitiveness of our graduate programs relative to peer institutions and thus our ability to attract the most outstanding scholars.

Second, we can scale the number of people accepted into a program to the demand for doctorates in the area. There is a rapidly growing body of literature regarding the oversupply of doctorates in many fields. While some of those pursuing advanced degrees in the humanities may be doing so as a purely intellectual activity, those in professional disciplines and science are normally looking forward to a career in their chosen field, and many are destined to be very disappointed. Documents on the subject of graduate enrolment prepared at McGill in recent years have looked at the issue of graduate enrolment entirely from the point of view of the University and not that of the community. We should not continue to ignore societal needs in mapping our strategy for the future.

The only way McGill can survive as a quality university is to become smaller. Some of my arguments are based on objective issues such as costs and revenues, and these can be tested by carrying out appropriate simulations.

Other issues are more philosophical in nature and involve the type of university we want McGill to be in the twenty-first century. It is highly unlikely that the entire community will ever agree on these questions, but we should start to develop some type of consensus on them now. The Principal has said that the University must change to survive. The time has come to decide what it is that we want to change ourselves into.