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Successive generations of university presidents, who typically have a lot more letters after their names than the average politician, have managed to protect their sector from the kind of government scrutiny that has been applied to every other publicly-funded service. No government has had the nerve to give the universities a blunt message, which boils down to “It’s about jobs.”

It’s about time, too. Ontario has a significant misfit between people’s skills and the jobs available. There are 160,000 jobs in the province that have been vacant for three months or more. Employers have a hard time finding skilled workers and it’s really up to college and universities, working with government, to close that gap.

Photo by Frank Gunn/HE CANADIAN PRESS

Ontario’s new funding plan will certainly focus universities’ attention on that goal. Starting next year, the government will begin tying the funding of individual universities to their performance on 10 key indicators. They include things like graduate earnings, hands-on learning, skills, graduate employment, graduation rate, research funding and community impact. The government will work with each college or university to set goals particular to that institution. Funding will depend on meeting those goals.

It’s not a token effort, either. When fully implemented in 2025, 60 per cent of university and college government funding will be based on performance. That’s a sharp contrast to the approach under the Liberal government. It had the same concept, but less than two per cent of funding was at stake and schools had to measure as many as 38 metrics.