The New Public Management and Post-Secondary Institutions: the Evolution of the Accountability Regime of Ontario Universities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The adoption of New Public Management (NPM) principles, practices and values in the Ontario public sector was one phase in the evolution of the accountability regime for universities and the post-secondary education (PSE) sector since the early 1990s. New Public Management advocates the adoption of private sector management principles and practices in the public service that re-defines citizens as customers, and emphasizes efficiency and effectiveness. It also places a high value on transparency and accountability to government. The research found that the evolution of the accountability regime for universities in Ontario was significantly influenced by NPM which has meant growing demands for universities to demonstrate value for money invested by government through institutional and system level performance measures and results. The findings in the comparative analysis of public policy and administrative reform of higher education in other jurisdictions show that the impact of NPM was even greater in the jurisdictions reviewed than in Ontario. The information and insights gathered from key informants in the PSE sector support the central argument and demonstrate the differing views on changes in the accountability regime and the challenges facing the PSE sector as a result of NPM-influenced reforms. The research also reveals a multiplicity of NPM-inspired accountability mechanisms: financial compliance focusing on administrative issues; voluntary accountability initiatives; and government-mandated performance measurement in terms of achievement of government’s policy goals of increased quality, access, and accountability. The changing nature of the accountability regime demonstrated an effort by the government to assert itself over autonomous entities over which it had very little control since the 19th century. It was concluded that the changes made by government in the accountability regime while not dramatic but incremental has had some impact in terms of holding universities more accountable. This incremental change in the accountability regime over several governments resulted in a disconnected web of accountability mechanisms which was not always effective. The paper concludes that there is a need for a rationalisation of the accountability framework that provides accountability to government and taxpayers without the costly burden of meaningless performance measurement and reporting.
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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 | 0.012 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".