A Tale of Two Universities

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When Bernard and Harold Shapiro get together at international learned conferences, they try to ignore the stares. "We're like a fairground attraction," grumbles Bernard, principal and vice chancellor of McGill University. The truth is, they are, if you substitute the groves of academe for a tent on the midway. Harold, Bernard's fraternal twin, is president of Princeton University. And the difficulty, at first glance, of distinguishing one 63-year-old sibling from the other is an ironic echo of the illusion that North America's institutions of higher education are one happy family.

This generalization is pure smoke and mirrors, to the consternation of Bernard. "People tend to characterize North America as one educational system, but there are growing differences that favor the U.S.," he says. The Montreal-born Shapiro brothers are among a small number of educators raising an alert over a growing gap in college funding on the continent.

The Shapiros' striking parallel success makes them experts on the subject of academic differences. Harold was president of the University of Michigan before moving in 1988 to head one of America's most richly endowed private universities. Bernard was appointed to the senior academic position at McGill in 1994 after stints at the University of Toronto and as Ontario's Deputy Minister of Education. The twins compare notes by telephone several times a week. In his office at Princeton's ivy-draped Nassau Hall, Bernard says he's an example of "how the world of scholarship in North America was integrated long before the North American Free Trade Agreement."

But integration has lately served to highlight the diminishing competitiveness of Canadian schools. In a 1995 paper, the brothers warned that the "new realities of the global economy" made universities more important than ever to a nation's success and also more susceptible to changing definitions of education. Their native land, they said, faced a failing grade: "The model on which universities have been funded since the Second World War...is clearly collapsing."

The Shapiros' grim analysis comes as Canada's 85 universities face a deep crunch. According to the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, government spending on higher education declined 8% between 1995 and 1998. U.S. spending increased 20% over the same period. "We've been steadily making cuts with the idea of investing later," says Herb O'Heron, an AUCC analyst. "But if we wait much longer, the trend will become irreversible, and our students won't be able to compete." Nor will their alma maters have much to offer.

The Shapiros warned that Canada's publicly funded higher education is no longer tenable compared with the U.S. mix of public and private institutions. Roughly two-thirds of 3,700 U.S. universities are private, and their alumni generate a huge educational dividend. Princeton's $5.4 billion endowment alone is greater than Nova Scotia's 1997 budget. Why not, they suggested, permit some of Canada's schools to go private, to become as competitive (and expensive) as their elite U.S. counterparts? "We've had excellence on the cheap until now," says Bernard, who rocked McGill by suggesting tuition increases and an upgrading of admission policies.

The figures support the argument that Canada is losing ground in the intellectual balance of trade. Some 22,000 Canadians enrolled at U.S. universities in 1998, while 3,000 American students came north. Two weeks ago, 20 of Canada's top universities joined in an extraordinary drive to recruit American students and plug a $200 million "education deficit," the loss of tuition fees and related expenditures caused by the exodus. A federally sponsored team met high school guidance counselors in Washington, New York City, Chicago, Dallas and San Francisco. The message: Canadian schools provide equal value at lower cost--at least 40% lower, thanks to the devalued Canadian dollar.

Some Americans found the message compelling. "Canada has the advantages of being inexpensive, foreign and only a couple of hours from Mom and Dad," says John Stafford, a counselor from Armonk, N.Y. But the plunging loonie, which makes Canadian education so cheap in U.S. terms, also reflects a reduction in national productivity--which in turn threatens the economic base that has enabled Canadian schools to match the standards of the best U.S. colleges. More could be done to return to a level playing field, including fewer restrictions on hiring U.S. professors, who must wait up to a year while university vacancies are advertised in Canada.

What's needed is more of the Shapiros' family-style networking. Canada, the U.S. and Mexico should cooperate in training a pool of students for success in the global economy. The European Union has moved toward establishing just such a regional educational system. But it won't happen until Canadian illusions of educational parity are replaced by cool-eyed realism.