Swallowing the college pill

M: So we’ve answered this already in several contexts, but do you think that too many students are choosing university as an automatic choice over college, with or without overt parental pressure? Or are you just trying to get more students into the post-secondary system generally?

LF: It’s a little of both. You do hear the stories quite often, from guidance counselors also. For example, I heard from one guidance counselor who found a college program that was beautifully suited for a student and they were all excited and the student came back the next day and said, “My father won’t let me go to college.” So there’s enough of that out there that I do think we need to fix that. [...] And students spend two and three years in university and there’s a fairly high dropout rate in university, and some of that is just students who aren’t finding themselves in that environment. That’s something that needs to be addressed. But equally, from our perspective, we want more students to go on to post-secondary education. Fifty percent of students don’t go on past high school initially. Some of them come back to college later on. But we still have about thirty percent of the population that never goes on to post-secondary education. And frankly, in ten or twenty years from now, that’s not going to be a pretty picture for those students when they are out in the workforce. [...]

M: Certainly you’ve mentioned some of this already, but would you care to comment on some of the other merits of college, as a potential direction for students?

LF: Oh sure! One of our college presidents likes to say, and I think it’s a good analogy, is that today we tend to think of post-secondary education as a kind of vertical hierarchy. University is at the top and if you can’t quite make that then you go to college. And if you can’t quite go to college then it’s apprenticeship. And if you can’t do that, well, go find yourself a job. Our view is that all of these avenues have great opportunities if you’re the right kind of person for them. So we’d like to see this as more of a horizontal plane, where students should try to figure out the best match for their skills and talents and interests. So, try to figure out what’s going to make you happy and what you want your lifestyle to be and then try to figure out the best place to go to achieve that. When you look at colleges, there’s such a huge range of things you can do. It’s a much more practical education. We find many students come from the more theoretical education of university and then come back to college, about ten percent of them now, to get a practical education, so we think there are lots and lots of people for whom this is a good, solid education that leads them someplace that creates a good lifestyle, and there are a lot of good job opportunities. Ninety-six percent of students are well-employed six months after graduation. Those are pretty good stats if you’re looking for a good job.

M: Other than viral ad campaigns, aimed at getting attention for this issue, what kinds of initiatives do you take to get more detailed information out there?

LF: Our hope, and so far it’s been successful, is that the advertising will direct students to the new website that we have, at www.ontariocolleges.ca. It has information about the choices students have at college, debunking some of the myths, and over time we’d like to build it into a much stronger career-planning tool that parents and students can use together. And so far, in the last eight days since the campaign was revealed, we’ve had 24,000 more hits on that site, the portion of the site for applications, than we had at the same time last year. So it’s making a big difference in terms of people looking at the information. In the longer haul – I mean you can’t do a campaign aimed at changing people’s minds and hearts for just six weeks – having seen the success of this phase, we’re going to have to sit down with the college presidents and say this needs to be long-term. We’re going to be running this for the next decade if we want to be really successful. So what are the next steps? We’ve gotten people’s attention, we’ve gotten that head snap, so now we need to keep their attention and keep the dialogue going and change some hearts and minds.