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This report focuses on government funding mechanisms and the post-secondary regulatory environment and their impact on the ability of post-secondary institutions to meet access demands and provide a quality learning experience. The main contention of this report is straightforward: the story of higher education in Canada since the early 1990s is heavily influenced by three key factors: federal funding, changing demographics, and the adoption of what has been described as ‘a climate of neo-liberal market-based philosophy’. This paper provides a glimpse of how funding mechanisms and the regulatory environment can affect the ability of post-secondary institutions to address access and quality concerns. There has been a marked change in government attitudes towards post-secondary education over the past few years, in particular, and improving access and quality are now twin goals that seem to be found in report after report across the country. Moreover, it is now apparent that governments are prepared to ‘re-invest’ in post-secondary education and improve capacity. In that regard, the lessons of the past offer a guide for the future.

In 2004, Canadian Policy Research Networks (CPRN) launched a four-part series on ‘Achieving access and excellence in Canada’s post-secondary institutions’. This report synthesises the work to date, focusing on the policy implications and providing an overview of the findings of the project and identifying key implications of these for decision-makers. It draws heavily on the findings of the first three reports in the series (indexed at TD/TNC 82.129, TD/TNC 86.555 and TD/TNC 87.85), but also considers other recent publications related to improving quality in Canada’s postsecondary institutions and the Roundtable hosted by CPRN on June 9, 2006 on Fostering Quality in Canada’s Post-secondary Institutions. The report contains an executive summary and seven main sections: following the introduction, section two reviews factors affecting postsecondary education (PSE); section three considers the fundamental question of what is meant by quality and how it should be measured; section four considers other conceptual issues that foster quality; the focus of section five is on recent trends in the funding and regulation of PSE in Canada; section six explores innovations in Canada’s universities and colleges; and the final section summarises the key findings and considers their policy implications. Key findings include: measuring quality should involve measuring how institutional resources and alternative pedagogies are associated with learning outcomes, while controlling for the ‘beginning characteristics’ of the students; most existing measures focus on inputs or outputs, not value-added; there is debate on the extent to which one should rely on market incentives to foster quality; case studies of major innovations at PSE institutions suggest that innovation arises principally from visionary leadership, but that external pressures also play a role; and there has been little effort to systematically evaluate innovations in the approach to teaching in PSE.