Every once in awhile I get asked a question like “why doesn’t Canada have private higher education”? The answer is complicated, in part because the question isn’t as precise as it seems.

To start, we have a lot of private higher education in Canada, but it’s at the sub-degree level. Stats on private higher education in Canada aren’t good but the best estimates suggest that there’s something on the order of 150,000 students attending somewhere in the region of 1800 institutions. Something like a third of these students are in programs of under 3 months in length; most of the rest are in programs between 3-12 months in length. Close to 2/3 of enrollments are either in health fields (medical assistants and technologists, for the most part) or in some form of IT/media (systems analysts, animation, etc.). Though the quality of these institutions varies, these programs survive and thrive because they fill a perceived need for employment-oriented courses of less than 12 months in length. Universities and colleges don’t fill that need, so the market does. Simple.

Now, the answer to why we don’t have something more like American private, non-profit universities is a bit trickier. We actually did, once. A good chunk of the universities in the Maritimes, Quebec and Ontario started life exactly the way American private universities did: as private, often religiously-focussed institutions making efforts to ensure that local communities would have access to a supply of education teachers and clergymen. While governments began supporting universities in the 19th century, the assistance was spasmodic, in many places support was not regularized until after the second world war. Technically, universities like McGill are still private, in the sense that they choose their own Boards of Governors with no interference from government. They are “public” because they take public money in return for accepting conditions on how the money is spent (observing rules about tuition fees for instance), but there’s nothing to say they couldn’t at some point change their mind about this.

Actually, Canada still has a private system of universities, but they are (with one exception) religious in nature: Trinity Western in BC, King’s, Concordia and St. Mary’s in Alberta, Canadian Mennonite in Manitoba, Redeemer in Ontario, the Atlantic School of Theology – you get the idea. Quest University in British Columbia, set up a little over a decade ago, is the only secular private institution out there.

And this brings us to the heart of the question: when people ask “why no private higher ed in Canada”, what they really mean is “why aren’t there more Quest Universities out there”? And it’s a fair question: all over the world,private universities are a major part of national systems of higher education. Even in free-tuition Germany, over 10% of students choose to study in private fee-charging institutions. So why not here?

It’s not, for the most part, a legal issue. Most provinces have legislation which permits private organizations to offer degrees provided they can demonstrate quality of provision (use of the term “university” is a little trickier and usually requires an act of the legislature, but in principle there’s nothing stopping a government from bestowing that term on a private institution). And yet, despite this we still see few examples of private degree-granting institutions.

To understand why, we need to go back to our observation about why private colleges thrive in Canada at the sub-degree level: because they offer something no one else does. The way to think about private higher education is that it will thrive where there is a niche that public universities cannot or will not fill. In most developing countries (as well as in countries like Japan, Korea and Taiwan), private higher education thrives because governments cannot or will not supply higher education in sufficient quantity to meet demand. In Eastern Europe, private higher education thrived in social sciences in the wake of communism because these faculties in public universities were utterly discredited and/or couldn’t provide education in high-demand subjects like business and commerce. And as higher education gets more stretched in other countries in Europe one might start to see more private higher education providers (particularly in the UK)

But in Canada, there simply aren’t so many niches. Our universities are well-funded, cover pretty much the entire spectrum of studies, and compared to most university systems around the world, quite open to covering new and emerging areas of study even if they aren’t “traditional”. With few niches to fill, there isn’t a lot of room for private providers. Quest University does its thing by staking out a unique value proposition around pedagogy (the block learning system) and outdoor activities – probably not a niche that could sustain competitors, but enough of one to sustain itself.

Could this change? Could a new successful university appear in Canada on the scale of Quest, only larger? Yes. But it would take someone with deep pockets and a particular eye for strategy. More on this tomorrow.