Understanding How Impact Investing Can Transform Canada’s Post-Secondary Sector: An Intermediary Typology
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Issue Date
2025
Editor
Authors
Legin, Shelley
License
Subject
Faculty of management
Abstract
In Canada, availability of quality post-secondary education is not a problem. However, equitable participation is. Underrepresented learner populations including Indigenous peoples, immigrants, low socioeconomic and single parents participate at rates well below Canada’s population (aged 25 to 64 years) participation rate of 54%. Situating impact investing as a mechanism to address this inequity in post-secondary participation rates in Canada, I first focus on understanding why impact investing is not currently used in the higher education space by exploring what institutional conditions are preventing the use of impact investing. Next, conditions poised to enable impact investing and how these institutional conditions can be transformed are explored to facilitate use of impact investing as a potential solution. Most importantly, drawing on this context, I address the role of an intermediary in bridging the supply of impact investment and post-secondary institution demand for funding with the theoretical conceptualization of an intermediary typology of ideal types. To gain insight into how impact investing could be implemented to affect participation rates, 25 semi-structured interviews were conducted with 13 Canadian college and university presidents and senior administrators and 12 social finance ecosystem actors including government executives, impact fund presidents and executive directors. Findings comprise two systemic institutional conditions contributing to limiting underrepresented populations’ participation rates: grade-point average (GPA) as the dominant admissions criteria, and a profound inertia of entrenched colonialism. Also, the findings identify enabling conditions which include: 1) external pressure as triggering potential for transformation, 2) the imperative of access as a core institutional value, 3) a case for building organizational capacity, and 4) the need for social impact investing market infrastructure in the higher education sector. With this contextual frame, findings culminate in an intermediary typology of ideal types being the Leveraged Traditionalist, Informed Specialist and Relational Collaborator. This dissertation argues that these different types of intermediaries have distinct functions and deliverables and play an important infrastructure role in the development of impact investing field. The study finds that the Relational Collaborator is the most promising intermediary type for achieving transformational and scalable results. Opportunities for future research stem from the provision of a standard impact investing intermediary typology to examine across various sectors facing other wicked social problems and to advance a broader or evolving typology globally.
Description
2025