In the SM2 Dashboard I created, slide five contains what each university had identified as their Program areas of Strength and reflected their rank (deliberate or otherwise) in each university’s SMA document. Slide six added to that with Program areas of expansion. That exercise appeared to be much more about the identification of differentiation than operationalizing it.
Where SMA2 asked institutions to nominate metrics and measures as part of strength-based differentiation, SMA3 asks institutions to nominate a subject area based on institutional strength and focus and also requires a system-wide measure, the “proportion of enrolment (FTEs, domestic and international) in an institution’s program area(s) of strength” as reported in the University Statistical Enrolment Report (USER).
Weingarten and Deller’s roadmap’s principles of differentiation were reflected in the proliferation of institutionally-specific metrics in SMA2, but not in their linking to funding decisions. SMA2’s institutional metrics’ had a comparative lack of significance for funding, with over 20 system-wide metrics representing only 4% of funding.
Many metrics contained within the 21 university SMA2s could not be measured by any party other than the institution itself (measures such as the actual values of the baselines that the targets were relative to, or wholly internal measures) or have outcomes compared to peer institutions’.
SMA3’s single Institutional Strength/Focus metric offers a clear, teaching-related differentiation that in the final years of SMA3 can represent as much as 25% of the 60% of performance-based funds an institution receives (as much as 15% overall). In SMA3 all institutions nominate their own area of strength, but the USER data source and proportion of enrollment measure are consistent.
For thematic comparative purposes, the statements used in SMA3 versus the Program areas of strength and Program areas of expansion used in SMA2 don’t make for the same visual analysis of what clusters of program strengths exist in Ontario – and that’s not a bad thing. With SMA3’s ideas of growth, expansion and strength being tied to a formula that extends across all metrics, not a nominated program or groups of programs, this comparison does not offer the same system-wide insight into stated intent that the SMA2 growth comparison offered.
This dashboard offers a themetized comparison of each university’s statement. Full statements are in the table below.
The other difference between SMA2 and SMA3 on the topic of strengths is the apparent strategic decisions involved in nominating an Institutional Strength/Focus. There’s an incentive to nominate a statistical strength that will meet annual targets, not one that reflects a genuine strength. With SMA2, strengths were just a list.