Doug Ford’s Tories want to know if Ontario’s colleges and universities measure up.

If not, public funding will dry up.

In one of the most ambitious plans undertaken by the Progressive Conservative government, annual funding of higher education is facing a major overhaul that will place new emphasis on economic performance.

Over the next two months, the Tories are putting the finishing touches on plans to measure not merely how many students graduate, but how fast they land jobs — and how much money they make. The less these graduates earn, the less in turn will be the cash flow from the government to their alma mater.

Once the metrics are phased in over the next few years, fully 60 per cent of $4.5 billion in provincial funding will be subject to review and punitive clawbacks on every campus. That compares to as little as 1.2 per cent today.

The controversial changes to postsecondary cash flow, buried in Ford’s first budget, raised few eyebrows at the time — overshadowed by a larger conflict with teachers’ unions and unpopular changes in class sizes. Now, with billions of dollars at stake, colleges and universities are scrambling to make sense of the budget’s biggest sleeper issue.

Are the Tories trying to turn the academy into an algorithm? Will the humanities and social sciences — which teach critical thinking and reward intellectual curiosity — pay the price if graduates don’t find lucrative work compared to, say, more nimble and practical commerce students?

Will we teach students for the jobs of today, not the work of tomorrow? What happens to popular STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) faculties if the booming economy goes bust and graduates can’t command the same salaries they once did? Will schools be squeezed for reasons beyond their control?

All fair questions. But there are other good ones worth asking, some of which are top of mind for this government:

Shouldn’t universities and colleges be accountable for the billions they get from taxpayers every year? Can’t their performance be measurable? Are high-paid professors, protected by the tradition of tenure, adapting to the demands of millennials in a modern economy?

Now a rookie minister is trying to decide next steps.

After Ross Romano landed the higher education portfolio last summer, he set out to meet every one of Ontario’s 45 university and college presidents for quiet consultations out of the public eye. It was a marked departure from his predecessor, the elusive Merrilee Fullerton, who announced this and other major changes to the sector without ever meeting most of the people who run it.

“If the data is off, the whole thing fails,” says Romano, perched in the downtown office where he blue-skies his ideas by marking up a window that he uses as a mock whiteboard.

Isn’t he worried that a liberal arts education will get squeezed by metrics that emphasize return on investment? In the spirit of full disclosure I confess to studying the humanities before majoring in economics (and that I’m a visiting practitioner at Ryerson), before asking Romano what he studied.

Turns out he took sociology, psychology and justice courses at Algoma University in his native Sault Ste. Marie before studying law in Windsor, adding: “I wouldn’t be here if not for the arts and humanities.”

Romano insists he won’t sell out the liberal arts just because it doesn’t pay big dividends. He points out that future humanities programs will be measured against their own past performance, not compared to rival faculties that command a premium on the job market.

He acknowledges that campuses can’t be held hostage to economic swings. After university presidents pointed out the problem, he asked for “force majeure” language to make allowance for economic volatility beyond their control.

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He answers my questions with one of his own: Without any metrics, how will we know what we’re doing right or wrong in postsecondary education?

The point, he argues, is to encourage universities and colleges to help the province — and its taxpayers — get value for money at a time when the economy is hamstrung by “jobs without people and people without jobs.”

But what happens if there are false positives (and misleading negatives)? What if universities start “gaming” the system by choosing only those applicants, and investing only in those faculties, with the best odds of economic success — sacrificing the pursuit of knowledge and academic inquiry? And why deliver such a rapid-fire jolt to the system, ramping up the metrics from a mere 1.2 per cent to 60 per cent of the $4.5 billion funding envelope in a mere four years?

Yes, the ivory tower can seem ossified at times, overdue for shock treatment. But a truly wise government knows what it does not know, and strives to do no harm when rolling out an untried remedy.

In the U.S., similar metrics have yet to show much promise beyond motivating campus leaders to minimize their exposure to risk — by decreasing the length of programs (fewer dropouts), and admitting only the most promising (privileged) students while squeezing marginalized groups — because with metrics, nothing succeeds like success.

Romano knows he and his PC government will be measured by voters on how well his new postsecondary metrics perform. He is also mindful that students might be unfairly shortchanged if local campuses pay the price for poor performance with reduced funding for their facilities.

The trouble with measurements is they offer the illusion of precision. Without context, they are a pretext for cuts.

I ask Romano what causes him to lose the most sleep after getting an earful from university and college presidents in recent months.

“The data is the biggest one. Because if we do not have clean data, how can we expect institutions to be bound by these terms?”

The devil isn’t just in the details but the data.