About Me

As a practitioner and post-secondary leader, I am interested in service, policy, and governance interventions to support increased access and success in post-secondary education.

As a researcher, my work interrogates the relationship between decision contexts and policy choices, which is important given the societal value placed on higher education in the formation of human and social capital. Rigorous research in these areas is needed in light of societal concerns about affordability, accessibility, and participation in higher education. This research identifies the conditions in which different policy ideas prevail, and assesses which policies will have a greater likelihood of intended impacts.

I have specialized in Canadian higher education policy, using a political economy lens. Using interdisciplinary approaches, my research approaches questions of governance through comparative analyses of episodes of policy choice and the characteristics of decision-making communities. This contributes to improved understanding of politics in higher education, revealing the dynamics influencing decision-makers and providing new process knowledge for advocates in the policymaking community.

Recent research has employed a variety of comparative methods to explore features of post-secondary education policy and questions of governance, including politics in post-secondary education and policymaking communities. My most recent co-authored publication examined policy coordination for higher education policy in federal systems. 

One of my recently completed projects examines the academic policy landscape across Canadian public post-secondary institutions, posing the question “What is the current state of policymaking on academic accessibility and accommodation for students at Canadian public post-secondary institutions?”.  This effort is part of a multi-year, interdisciplinary national study with several collaborators, Landscape of Accessibility and Accommodation for Students with Disabilities in Canadian Post-Secondary Education (2016-2018), that builds upon previous National Educational Association of Disabled Students (NEADS) work.

As a Visiting Professor in the Department of Leadership, Higher, and Adult Education at OISE, University of Toronto (Fall 2015), I began the development of a new pan-Canadian panel dataset in higher education to analyze policy adoption. Early comparative analyses have been focusing on descriptions of policy patterns and variations, and the results of these analyses will be used for planning and generating hypotheses to be explored through qualitative methods. Future projects will generate rich, qualitative insights into policy decisions and policy outcomes through in-depth exploration of individual cases of policy change using historical methods. Longer term, I will undertake explanatory analyses, focussing on main conjectures of causal relationships found in this policy community, using event history models to analyze policy change and accounting for differences in policy choices. Additional analyses will focus on assessing the relationship between specific policy choices and resultant outcomes, using difference-in-difference approaches.

One current project, derived from the policy innovation and diffusion literature and using longitudinal analysis, will test the effects of diffusion dynamics on provincial higher education policy adoption patterns. This research will illuminate both the nature of policy origins as well as the relationship between policy choices and outcomes. One important contribution from this project will be a new analytic tool, a set of policy typologies, which will enable analyses into underlying dimensions of this policy arena, thereby strengthening future measurement and concept formation in this area.

Another current project examines organized interests and intermediary organizations in Canadian higher education, addressing forms of interest articulation and influence on policy-making.

My doctoral work, The Political Economy of Tuition Policy Formation, employed qualitative methods in a comparative case study to examine the dynamics of major policy change in higher education. Using two conceptual frameworks from political science, the advocacy coalition framework and the multiple streams method, the research investigated the role of five categories of factors in major tuition policy change in British Columbia, Manitoba, and Ontario. The research demonstrated that in addition to key environmental conditions, several distinct political practices are central to higher education policy generation. Political parties utilize higher education policies to differentiate themselves from their opponents at key points in the electoral cycle, and engage in brokerage politics with advocacy groups and organized interests to achieve electoral goals. These political practices have a direct impact on policy selection and subsequent policy adoption.

This research contributes to critical policy debates in light of concerns about governance in higher education. While much scholarship examines the impacts of government decisions in higher education, less attention has been paid to their formation. My line of enquiry exposes new evidence of how politics affects policy, including how higher education policy serves important political functions beyond espoused social goals. It contributes new empirical approaches to studying the policy process as well as conceptualization of change to an underdeveloped field of analysis within Canadian and American policy studies. This research opens a new direction for future international, comparative research of interest to scholarly audiences, and for practitioners, provides valuable resources for improving policy advocacy. Publications associated with this research includes “Anatomy of a tuition freeze: The case of Ontario”, in the Canadian Journal of Higher Education, and “Thawing a tuition freeze: Two Canadian cases of policy change in comparative perspective” in the Canadian Political Science Review.  

Ongoing research seeks to address an empirical gap in the higher education finance policy literature. The links between policymaking conditions and policy outcomes in Canada have yet to be fully mapped and empirically examined. Interesting research questions are: (a) What political, economic, and social factors influence tuition policy choice? (b) What is the relationship between decision makers’ policy goals and policy outcomes? (c) What patterns and relationships can be observed through comparative analysis of tuition policy changes over two decades? (d) How can these policy changes be conceptualized to allow for new insights?

In another upcoming project, I will study government reform through a comparative investigation of structural adjustments to higher education systems undertaken by provincial and state-level governments.

Previous research projects have examined questions of student access and success in the college and institute sector, including factors in apprenticeship completion; equity in apprenticeship; retention in engineering, vocational, and trades training programs; strategic enrolment management in ESL programs; immigrant and minority access and student services interventions; program evaluation; and labour market and educational outcomes of community college and technical institute graduates.