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Ontario Publishes the Third Generation of Strategic Management Agreements: Performance-Based Funding

On April 11, 2019 the government of Ontario announced its first full budget that brought changes to how Ontario’s Post-Secondary Education system is funded, announcing that up to 60% will be performance-based by the 2024–25 academic year. A change in ministers and the outbreak of a global pandemic later: November 26, 2020 the government of Ontario published all 21 universities’ 2020-25 Strategic Mandate Agreements (SMAs).

I intend to analyze all 21 university SMAs as the culminating project in my Masters of Education and will post more info on this blog.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, funding will not be linked to its performance until 2022–2023. MCU also added that all other aspects of the model, including data collection, evaluation and publication, will continue as planned and each SMA includes three years of historical data to support some of the performance data collection.

Ontario has now committed to a Performance-Based Funding system that mixes system-wide metrics and contractual institutional metrics in a way found nowhere else in the world. The use of a Community and Local impact of student enrolment metric and the negotiation of a per university Economic impact metric and measure is certainly uncommon. The metric that draws the least on other PBF programs is the Skills & Competencies metric that is based on results of the OECD’s Education and Skills Online Tool, for a random sample of undergraduate students (domestic and international). At this point, I do not know if the results refer to scores on the Education & Skills Online or simply the result of students completing it, but at least when it comes into effect in 2022-23 it is fixed at only 5% of each PBF (other metrics can otherwise be institutionally weighted between 5% and 25% in 2022-23).

I am interested in comparisons between the universities in support of the SMA’s original differentiation mandate. For now, here’s a reminder of the metrics and where to find the SMA3s.

SMA3 University Performance Metrics

Ontario's performance-based funding mechanism requires institutions to assign weightings to metrics to reflect institutional strengths and differentiated roles in the postsecondary education system based on negotiation targets. Assigned metric weightings will impact performance-based funding on a metric-by-metric basis per the table below. Because of COVID-19 institution’s funding will not be linked to its performance until 2022–2023.

Where to find each university’s SMA

Links to the MCU and some university copies of their SMA3s, as of Sunday, November 29, 2020.