The future is not what it used to be: re-examining provincial postsecondary funding mechanisms in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This commentary suggests that current provincial funding mechanisms for postsecondary education (PSE) in Canada are not adequate for achieving the sectoral goals of quality, accessibility and responsiveness to the needs of the labour market. It argues that alternative funding mechanisms need to be considered, particularly student-based funding. The author begins with an overview of the financing of Canadian higher education systems, then highlights several policy objectives that provincial governments need to focus on. The essential features of a conceptual framework, based on the 'notion of agency' that highlights the importance of incentives in PSE funding, are described. This is followed by a description and evaluation of the funding mechanisms employed by the provinces, before an alternative that replaces a significant part of current institutional subsidies with student-based funding, is proposed. The commentary concludes with a brief discussion of policy imperatives.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.013 | 0.041 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.041 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.014 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".