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1/ Judging by the reactions to the CBC story today people are *waaay* too hung up on the individual indicators being proposed for a performance-based funding (PBF) system and not nearly concerned enough about the way dollars will follow any points awarded trhough these indicators
2/ Forget musing about how indicator X will affect distribution of funds. Until you know how results will be scored, how scores will be weighted, how weighted scores translate into $s and how all this compares to the current weighted enrolment formula, it's all meaningless.
3/ What *does* matter, a lot, is whether the funds are distributed by the envelope method or by the contract method. Government is proposing the latter and I think that's a recipe for chaos.
4/ Under the envelope method, indicators get scored and weighted and at the end of the day each institution gets a certain number of points. Your institution's share of those points = your share of the performance pool. Amounts will be unequal but of course they are unequal now
5/ They are unequal for perfectly good reasons. It would be asinine to offer the same amount of $s to all institutions regardless of enrolment. So in fact in most PBF systems, the scores and weighted scores are engineered to mimc enrolment at least to some degree. WHICH IS GOOD.
6/ The other method is the contract method. Each institution is given targets, presumably different by institution, according to mission. if you hit the targets, you get your $; if you don;t you get less.
7/ This is being pushed by Govt as being "fairer" to institutions; Algoma not forced to compete in same pot as Waterloo, etc. Sounds good, but basically it becomes a competition in who can set expectations the lowest.
8/ The ideal in this scenario is to keep your performance targets low so they are easy to hit. If they come too high, some of your $ might be in danger. So what it arguably rewards is institutions with the wiliest negotiators.
9/ The problem here is that it;s not clear what happens to $ if institutions miss their targets. In envelope system, an institution has a bad year someone else gets $. In a contract system it goes to...who? Treasury? not even clear this would be legal.
10/ The legislature votes an amount (currently $5B and change) to give to institutions. If TCU comes back and says to legislature, oh yeah we only spent $4B because institutions missed targets, AG is going to come and clip them upside the head. $5B means $5B.
11/ (another issue: envelope PBFs handle cyclical economic issues way better than contract PBFs. In former, a downturn reduces everyone's points, but since all $ spent anyway, amonut & distribution likely unchanged. In latter, everyone would miss targets, everyone would lose $.)
12/ Anyways, I'm glad people are paying attention to indicators and are alert to perverse incentives. But there are bigger architectural issues at play here that need to get solved first, otherwise there could be real damage.
13/ It's actually a triad: you can genuinely have 60% of funding be PB, you can have a contract-based PB system & you can have stable system financing - but you can only pick two. Problem is, govt appears not to understand this. Which one will they drop when they do? That's the Q
