New Public Management and Ceremontial Change at Ontario Colleges and Universities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During the 1990s, the Ontario government revised its funding approach for community colleges and universities in response to escalating provincial government budgetary deficits combined with weak economic growth. Between 1992 and 2004, increases in government funding failed to keep pace with inflation, such that Ontario's per student funding dropped to last place in Canada. Case studies of two Ontario colleges and two universities were conducted to determine the impact of these changes on institutional planning and budgeting. The motivation was to assess the validity of New Public Management (NPM) principles in explaining the actions and the reactions of the institutions. These institutions responded by adopting more strategic approaches including deregulated programming, better program costing, developing new revenue sources and markets, and seeking efficiencies through larger class sizes, simplified grading, and the use of more part-time instructors. A revised version of Lapsley's (2008) NPM framework was used to assess the effects of the Ontario government's actions upon colleges and universities. On the surface, the colleges and universities responded largely as predicted under NPM, with structural changes to their general management approach, encouraging entrepreneurial behaviour through financial incentives, and enhancing institutional transparency, accountability, and 'auditability' through Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). However, what appears to have occurred was more ceremonial adoption of NPM. Effectively, the institutions experienced change on the margins, and continued to budget and manage much as they always have.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".