Archive for November, 2009

The good and the bad about taking an extra year to get a degree

Imagine: you are in the last semester of your undergraduate degree. You studied hard. You worked two jobs in the summer. You are tens of thousands of dollars in debt. You can’t wait to finally pick up that degree and begin the next stage of your life. But when you turn in your application for graduation, you are—surprise!—missing one course and will have to come back next year.

It’s every senior student’s nightmare, and it’s more common than you might think. Sometimes by accident and sometimes by design, an increasing number of students are taking longer than four years to finish four-year degrees. Statistics Canada reports that half of all 22-year-olds were still in school in 2001, compared to a quarter in 1971. Many students are choosing to take longer to work, take time off, or simply avoid going crazy from a full course load; but even for those who want to get out in four, there are many pitfalls to dodge.

Ann Tierney, vice-provost for students at the University of Calgary, says that the key to staying on the four-year track is academic advising: you’ve got to get an adviser as soon as you get to university. “For some students,” says Tierney, “the first time they see an adviser is in a reactive way, when they’re going into their last year.” General arts and science students are most affected by the problem because they have so much choice. No matter how conscientious the student, the university system is difficult to navigate and making a small mistake that can add a semester can happen to anyone. “Sometimes students feel they do not need any help and then realize late in their program that they should have sought the advice of an adviser earlier,” says Tierney.

The nasty fourth-year surprise that happens to many would-be graduates is precisely the reason Calgary last year created its “graduation guarantee” program. Tierney says the program, which promises to pick up the tab for any courses a student is forced to take after the four-year mark, was conceived in response to undergraduates and advisers who complained that course scheduling conflicts sometimes prevented students from graduating in four years. Advisers, says Tierney, “were reporting how frustrating it is meeting with a student going into their last year and having that student realize they hadn’t taken the prerequisite needed to take the fourth-year course that was only offered in the first semester.”

One of the most common reasons students stretch out their undergraduate degrees is indecision. Olwen Cowan, who is set to graduate in spring 2010 with an education degree from the University of British Columbia, entered university as an English major, then switched to political science, then to sociology before going back to English and, finally, education. She spent five years earning her bachelor’s degree, but when she left high school, Cowan didn’t know what interested her or what she excelled at. “It wasn’t until I went to college,” she says, “that I discovered so many different ideas and beautiful writers. It was mind-blowing.”

College and university students are at a greater risk of infection

Ontario has launched a $650,000 “Join the Resistance” ad campaign to encourage college and university students to roll up their sleeves for the H1N1 flu shot. It has also given the go-ahead for companies to vaccinate employees in the workplace. Some workplace clinics could begin as early as next week at some locations in the province, officials said.

Related: Why students should get the H1N1 vaccine

Ontario’s chief medical officer of health said Friday that almost half of those hospitalized in Ontario for swine flu are people under 20. Thirteen per cent of deaths in Ontario related to H1N1 have been in people under age 25.

However, historically only about 25 per cent of people aged 17 to 24 get a seasonal flu shot compared to about 45 to 50 per cent of the general population, Dr. Arlene King told a briefing. Yet college and university students are at a greater risk of transmitting the infection because they live and study in close proximity to each other in dormitory rooms and study halls, she said.

King cited statistics that 25,000 or more of every 100,000 people who are not immunized will get sick with the flu. Of those, 25 to 100 will need hospitalization, 20 to 50 will end up in intensive care with most of them needing ventilators, and six will die.

“People cannot afford to let their guard down,” said King. “Everyone, including healthy young people, need to protect themselves against this new flu virus and the best way to do that is to get their flu shot,” she said.

The Ontario government sent an “email blast” this week to 53 student associations targeting 400,000 students. It also sent posters aimed at students to public health units and is posting advertising on websites to drive students to clinic listings. Next month, ads will be put in bars and restaurants. An animated “Join the Resistance” ad will run in cinemas throughout Ontario during the holidays.

The campaign to convince students to get immunized comes as several health units have decided to close their mass vaccination clinics next month after seeing a drop in H1N1 activity and public demand for the swine flu shot. Fifty-three flu assessment centres have also closed, leaving just six open.

Health units will “clearly be looking over the next couple of weeks” to decide if they still need mass vaccination clinics, King said. But the vaccine is available at more than 4,500 doctors’ offices, family health teams, hospitals and community health clinics across the province, said King. Students have also been receiving the shots at some universities including the University of Ottawa and Brock University.

What does it really mean, to represent students?

I recently created a twitter account. This is an unrelated fact, save that it explains how I was trolling around looking for a few people I wanted to follow. And I came across this article by the Ryerson Free Press. I resolved to ignore it, but now a couple days later it’s still in my head. So obviously it is more than just a passing annoyance. This article is almost a year old, but nonetheless I think it deserves a rebuttal.

The article calls out by name three former student representatives, and accuses them of (a) selling out the student movement and (b) using their roles as elected representatives as springboards for their later careers. I’ll decline to note who I was initially looking for when I found this article. But I will say that I know two of these people personally and the third by reputation. I wouldn’t call any of them friends exactly (if you’re wondering about my bias) but I’ve noted and appreciated their work in the past.

This article infuriates me for any number of reasons, but I’ll confine my criticism to the two primary critiques in the article itself. First, there is the idea that student leaders “sell out” the movement when they assume centrist – or even right-of-center – positions on issues. I simply cannot agree. I may find myself in opposition to the opinions expressed by these and other student leaders, but I am not prepared to dismiss their legitimacy simply because I disagree with them. The notion that there is only one orthodox position to assume on behalf of students is patently ridiculous. Students are free to elect whomever they want to represent them. And just as mainstream politics may swing among representatives that espouse one position or another, there is no reason to imagine that student politics must be different. If someone were to suggest that a candidate campaigned on one position and then did something radically different I would agree – that’s a problem. But simply to assume that centrist or right-of-center views represents selling out the movement is ignorant. This dismisses the possibility that students might have actually voted for that.

Second, and even more importantly, there is the assumption that these student leaders somehow used their former positions to form the basis of their future careers. As a former student leader myself, I find this very insulting. I wrote an article on this topic some months ago, but the central premise bears repeating. Students who assume prominent positions on campus are in no way guaranteed future success. Some do go on to achieve prominence in various fields. Others do not. But in either case the determining factor is not the positions they held as students. Elected office may be a brick in the wall of someone’s career, just as any job is one step along the path, but it is only that – one step or one brick. The totality of anyone’s personal career path is so much greater than any student office.

I need to refute this article because it perpetuates two very damaging myths. First, the notion that there is only one legitimate perspective to assume on students’ behalf. In my experience, students are very capable of electing representatives who stand for a large range of perspectives and views. Whether I happen to personally agree or not is irrelevant. So too if anyone else happens to agree. That’s politics for you. Sometimes people get elected who you don’t agree with. That doesn’t mean they are wrong, or ill-intentioned, or diabolical. Often, that simply means you have to rethink your ideas about the dominant views held by the voting base of people who elected them. Second, the idea that future success is created by elected student office. This is a dangerous myth because it encourages people to seek office for all the wrong reasons – no matter their political views. It isn’t true, of course. Maybe elected students are “successful” in greater percentages if only because they are naturally dynamic personalities. But the success still isn’t due to the prominence in student politics. I have plenty of counter-examples at my fingertips. But of course no one writes stories about the elected students who go on to do nothing in particular after their university days.

Student politicians and elected representatives make easy targets. This is true while they are in office and true even afterward. Part of assuming a prominent position is accepting this role as designated target. I lived through this myself and I have a lot of sympathy for students who are living through it now. But when criticism spills over from attacking the students of the day to attacking the movement as a whole, I need to make some reply. Flawed though the results may be, in an immediate sense, the system as a whole does work. Students are capable of electing a large range of potential representatives – and this range is what legitimates the choices they make. And elected representatives truly don’t derive enough personal benefit to ever make the job worth it for selfish reasons (even if a few may try) and this is what guarantees sincere, if not always effective, representation.

It does work. Don’t let the cynics get you down.

—

Questions are welcome at jeff.rybak@utoronto.ca. Even the ones I don’t post will still receive answers, and where I do use them here I’ll remove identifying information.

Could California be a model for Canadian research policy?

For all the erudition and scholarship that goes on at Canadian campuses, ambition is what really drives most colleges and universities. Colleges want to be small universities. Small universities want to be big universities. And big universities want to be Harvard.

Evidence of this aspiration is everywhere. In Alberta, a pair of community colleges just became universities. The same thing happened last year in British Columbia. In Ontario, Brock University in St. Catharines has embarked on an aggressive marketing campaign to rebrand itself from small regional university to higher-status research centre. And then there’s the recent furor created by the aspirations of five of Canada’s biggest universities.

In an exclusive interview with Maclean’s in August, the presidents of the University of British Columbia, University of Alberta, University of Toronto, McGill University and Université de Montréal outlined a controversial proposal to realign national post-secondary funding. Under the Big Five plan, a few schools would emphasize high-level research while the remaining schools would focus primarily on undergraduate education. That would allow a more efficient distribution of scarce research funding, vault the Big Five closer to their international peers, and tackle the issue of Canada’s underperformance in producing world-class university research.

It’s clearly an ambitious plan, as far as the Big Five are concerned. But is limiting the ambition of every other college and university the best plan for Canada? And what would such a plan look like?

You have to look elsewhere for an example. In the U.S., many states set out explicit expectations for all public post-secondary institutions, and California’s Master Plan for Higher Education, created in 1960, is one of the best known.

At the top of the state hierarchy is the University of California, which boasts many of the world’s most famous campuses, including Berkeley and UCLA. Its nine institutions receive the bulk of research funding, focus heavily on graduate students, and are the only public universities in California allowed to grant Ph.D.s. UC accepts the top 12 per cent of all state high school graduates. Next come 23 California State campuses. Cal States are primarily undergraduate institutions. Professors teach twice as many classes as their peers at UC and do much less research. The top third of California high school graduates are guaranteed a place in the Cal State system. Finally, more than 100 state community colleges act as feeders for Cal State. They are required to offer a spot for every high school graduate in California. “The two key aspects of the master plan are a clear differentiation of which students go where, as well as which schools do what,” says Todd Greenspan, director of academic planning at the University of California office of the president. “Everyone knows their place.”

Emergency Council meeting being set up to retract complaint, ask AMS President Blake Frederick to resign

For the first update on the story, click here.

Amazingly enough, student councillors don’t like finding out that they’ve launched a formal human rights complaint to the United Nations over  press releases, and news stories, and tweets.

An motion to call an emergency meeting of AMS Council has been brought forward, with the following items being on the agenda:

1. That Council retract the complaint to the UN against the VC and Canadian governments, and direct the AMS Communications Department to issue a press release stating that this was not the will of the Society.

2. That Council prohibit the expenditure of any further AMS resources of any nature on this action.

3. That Council request that President Blake Frederick resign from Council.

4. That Council request that VP External Affairs Tim Chu resign from Council.

If the motion to ask for resignation passes, and Frederick and Chu choose not to resign, council will serve the two of them with notices of impeachment.

Why are they so upset? Well, filing an official human rights complaint with the United Nations is a pretty big deal. In their steps to do so, there was a pretty giant lack of communication.

— In March, the executive committee signed off on the following:

“The AMS will pursue a legal battle with the Province on the basis that the recent Education funding cuts are against the UN charter.”

— The AMS (meaning, Frederick and Chu) looked for firms that would take on the case. They decided upon Pivot Legal Society, which is pretty much a straight forward legal advocacy group for the disadvantaged.

— In October, Pivot Legal Society informed the AMS that the case was feasible, and they would go ahead pursuing the case with their consent. Frederick and Chu claimed that the executive committee agreed to go forward with the case, even though a specific motion was not passed. Two other members of the executive committee (VP Finance Tom Dvorak and VP Academic Johannes Rebane) disagreed that the question had even been brought up.

— The AMS collected affidavit from people concerned about high tuition rates, and gave them to Pivot Legal Society. They determined that Markle (who was no longer a student) had the best story—despite the fact Markle made upwards of $20,000 in 2008/2009 as an AMS Executive—and thus would be included in the complaint. The AMS is paying for Markle’s fees.

— The Communications Planning Group, which you would think would play a big part in this, was not notified of the press conference, the press release, or that this was even on the table. The student newspaper The Ubyssey wasn’t even informed of the press conference (other local media were). Nonetheless, the press conference happened. And the controversy began…

On the whole, it looks that at most 4–5 people within the student union knew what was going on, and that they deliberately tried to keep this decision as secret as possible. While it’s fair to argue that there were on-the-record minutes that said the AMS was investigating this, it seems absolutely preposterous that something of this magnitude (assuming you believe that the United Nations has legitimacy in the area of provincial post-secondary education, which is extremely questionable) would be kept so quiet, and never debated publicly. Oh, and the society is on the hook for thousands of dollars in legal fees. Given all that, don’t be surprised if a) This complaint to the United Nations is quickly retracted, and b) Blake Frederick’s reign as President ends within a fortnight.

Yes, you heard that correctly.

UBC’s Alma Mater Society, the largest student union in Canada, has filed a complaint to the UN in an attempt to address high tuition rates. I really don’t want to preface this any more than need be, so here’s the press release…

The UBC Alma Mater Society (AMS), represented by Pivot Legal LLP, has filed a complaint to the United Nations regarding the federal and provincial government’s failure to meet their international obligations to provide accessible post-secondary education.

By failing to adequately control tuition fees and not providing sufficient financial support to students, the complaint states that the government is violating its commitment under Article 13 ( c ) of the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights which states “Higher education shall be made accessible to all, on the basis of capacity, by every appropriate means, and in particular by the progressive introduction of free education.”

“Since the tuition fee freeze was lifted in 2002, student fees in British Columbia have more than doubled,” says AMS President Blake Frederick. “The high cost of tuition means that many capable students, particularly those from lower-income families, are unable to get a university education.”

Lack of financial resources has been cited as the leading reason why BC students are unable to pursue post-secondary education. In 1996, the provincial government enacted legislation that froze tuition rates throughout the province. This was an important step towards reducing financial barriers to post-secondary education. The provincial government ended the tuition fee freeze in 2002, and since that time, the AMS has actively lobbied the provincial and federal government to regulate tuition fees in the province.

“When Canada signed on to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, they made a commitment to work towards free post-secondary education,” says Katrina Pacey, counsel for the AMS. “Instead, the government has increased tuition rates on an annual basis. We are asking the UN to hold the government accountable for their complete failure to live up to their commitment to accessible higher education.”

The AMS, which represents 45,000 students at UBC’s Vancouver Campus, is named as a complainant alongside UBC graduate Tristan Markle. The complainants have asked that the UN appoint an independent expert of Special Rapporteur to investigate the situation.

The official complaint is here.

For the record, Tristan Markle was the AMS VP Administration in 2008/2009, and was a former leader of the UBC Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a self-professed “radical” group associated with protests and controversy on campus.

If you’re wondering why no current student is named as a complainant in this, it’s because the release has caught the entire campus off-guard—this wasn’t something that had been talked about in student council, or in any public meetings for that matter. Unsurprisingly, public reaction (“public reaction” being “facebook statuses and tweets) have thus far has ranged from “embarrassing and pointless” to “does the AMS have any understanding of international law?” to “I’m ready to quit everything I do on campus. It is so useless when you see the stupid bull shit that comes out of the AMS,” and finally, comparing it to “the finest lobbying / advocacy method used by nutjobs everywhere.”

In a related (and incredibly ironic note), just last month the AMS sent out a press release that criticized UBC, and due to the fact that it was a) incredibly inflammatory, and b) not passed by student council first, President Frederick narrowly avoided being censured.

I’ll be researching on whether this has any sort of precedence, whether there is even a smidgen of chance that the UN could/would do something about this, and if the only thing this will lead to is the perception that UBC students have more faith in the power of the United Nations than anyone outside of Ban Ki-Moon’s immediate family.

Also, if you want to see student politicians get really, really angry at their president via tweets, check out the messages being sent to AMS President Frederick.

Click here to read: Update on UBC Student Union complaint to the UN

It’s not a gift, and you don’t get points for being old, young, pretty or ugly

Once, sitting with some colleagues in the faculty lounge, conversation turned to a woman who was about to graduate from our university at the decidedly non-traditional age of 75. During this conversation, it was revealed by a grinning fellow professsor that the student in question had failed one of my courses.

“You failed a 75-year-old woman?” someone said incredulously.

“Well, in my own defence,” I replied, “she was only 72 when she took my course.”

I was proud of this bon mot, but my witticism concealed a more serious issue. What is a grade?

Many students, and some professors too, think of a grade as a kind of gift received in a kind of quiet exchange. The student provides attendance and assignments and, in an act of reciprocity, the professor offers a grade. The finer the one gift, the finer the gift given in return. This notion is reinforced by the language we use: “Professor Zeitz gave me a decent grade on my paper, but I don’t know why it wasn’t higher.”

The danger of this view of grading is that it implies that grades are distributed on the personal whim of the instructor. Thus, a student who receives a low grade can shrug it off because, in her mind, it is the malice of the instructor that is to blame. I have literally heard students make precisely this kind of complaint: “I got a lousy grade in his class. I don’t know why he doesn’t like me.” Even worse, when a student gets a grade that is close to the passing level, he cannot understand why Professor Wong just won’t give him a few extra points.

To my mind, however, a grade is not a gift. It is an assessment. It is an expert evaluation of the quality of work done for a particular assignment or on a particular test. It is not personal, and while there is no such thing as absolute objectivity, the grade should be based on clearly stated criteria which are, in turn, based on the expectations of the scholarly discipline in question. Nothing else matters. You don’t get points for being old, or young, or pretty, or ugly, or because you are on the basketball team. You don’t lose points for any of those things, either. And while a professor may reasonably tweak a final grade if she feels the student’s arithmetical score does not precisely match her success in the course, the question is still a simple if not easy one: to what extent did the student demonstrate a mastery of the course material?

This is why, to my mind, it is unethical for a professor to raise a grade simply to let a student get admitted to a graduate program, or keep a scholarship, or stay on a sports team. Those scholarship rules, and required averages, and team regulations are all there for a reason. And if professors raise the grades without academic justification, the grades become meaningless at best, misleading at worst. If those who are paying out scholarship funds demand an 80% average, and a prof helps a student keep that scholarship without having really earned it, that prof has colluded with the student in committing a kind of fraud because the student is taking money on false pretenses. If a sports league requires its players to pass all their courses, the prof who passes athletes just so they can play, is helping the team cheat. Such profs are cooking the academic books in much the same way crooked accountants fudge numbers in corporate backrooms.

People sometimes ask if I fail many students.  I reply that I never fail students, but sometimes, unfortunately, I am duty bound to bear witness to their failure. Even if they are 72.

A fantastic organization with a very awkward name

Recently I had the opportunity to attend and speak at this year’s annual western AMICCUS-C conference, hosted in Calgary by the Students’ Association of Mount Royal University. AMICUSS-C stands for the Association of Managers in Canadian College, University and Student Centres. That’s one hell of an acronym, isn’t it? But apart from the difficulty with the name it’s a great organization that people should know more about.

Students’ unions are big business. Okay, “big” may be pushing it, but far bigger than most suspect. Budgets in the seven-figure range are typical. Many unions have responsibility for their own restaurants and bars, buildings, and other services. And in order to run these things properly, unions quite naturally hire full-time managers to do the job. You wouldn’t want to rely entirely on students, after all, with the rapid turnover, annual instability, and general inexperience. Unions typically employ a lot of students also, but the full-time managers are different. They’re there to stay and it’s their job – for many it’s a real career.

How all of this infrastructure runs is frequently a mystery to students. First, many students don’t draw a clear distinction between services that are operated and delivered by their union and services that come from the university or college. For all practical purposes it often doesn’t matter. And second, even where students know what their union is really doing, the full autonomy and power of the union may not be obvious. It’s easy to imagine a relationship similar to student government in high school, where student activities are still directed at the highest level by the administration. But it simply isn’t true. Unions are separately incorporated. They exist outside the administration entirely. The directors of these unions have as much power and responsibility as the directors of any private corporation. And many are still teenagers.

Seen from this perspective, the role of a full-time professional manager in a union environment is very complicated. The manager is certain to be older – maybe much older – and to have far more experience. But the students are still in charge. This isn’t theoretical. Students do the hiring, set the compensation packages, make decisions about promotion, and yes sometimes fire people. When a union is running well students tend to do this with the benefit of a lot of competent advice. When a union is running badly, well, sometimes things go less professionally. But either way these decisions affect people’s careers.

There is also a very complicated dance to perform with the administration of the university or college. As I said, the administration isn’t calling the shots. But they do have deeply entrenched interests. While the union may own a building or control it with a long-term lease, the institution typically owns the land. While a union may run the campus pub, the administration probably holds the liquor license. Contracts for cleaning, maintenance, and utilities in student space may or may not be carried out by the staff of the institution. All of these relationships need to be managed. While the employees of the union and the employees of the school may both “work for” students in some sense, their relationship towards students is very different. And so their relationship towards one another is complicated.

How the worst loss has made for a small gain. It’s not worth it.

Carnage is a sweet thing to watch. It’s something you can bond over, maybe with a beer and greasy pub food. Watching two men fight is primal and hideous but it can make you friends, simply for the fact that you might be rooting for the same guy to bleed. I was spending my Saturday night doing just that with my friend Matt at Ryerson’s pub. We had just ordered and were settling down to watch a UFC Fight Night. Tito Ortiz vs. Forest Griffin – I had been anticipating this fight for a week. I just wanted to see Griffin lose and run away like a little girl. I had money on this fight.

During one of the welterweight divisions, my friend Rachel called me from her room on U of T’s campus. I didn’t want to pick up the phone because the fight was so rough, so enticing, but I decided to make the sacrifice. I walked outside so I could hear her.
“Do you remember Cayley Chapman, Joi Edgar and Emma Ransom? From high school?” she asked. Certainly I remembered them; we had only graduated a year and a half ago. They were fine girls, I guess, but I didn’t have much communication with them. Rachel knew them much better.
“Sure I do. What about them?”
“They’re dead.”
Rachel went on to explain that the three girls were driving to Calgary from Lethbridge on a weekend trip when their car spun out of control and drove over the median into oncoming traffic. They hit another car straight-on. There was a woman and her baby in the other car. Everyone was found dead on the scene except for the baby, saved by the car seat.

I explained to Matt that I had to leave, paid my bill and rushed over to Rachel’s. We sat in her dark residence room, browsing Facebook until 3 a.m. as the details of the accident slowly leaked via a shallow social networking website. “RIP Cayley, Joilinn, Emma” was the Facebook status theme du jour, and it seemed that everyone we went to high school with knew. Rachel was getting messages left, right and centre. “Rachel, did you hear?” “Oh my god, it’s so awful.” “I’m shocked. I’m just shocked, I can’t even believe it.” For this brief speck in time, everyone was friends and we were all in high school and we were all holding hands, no matter how far we were. I made a few phone calls to Calgary and Victoria, where I knew some of my friends were. They knew the girls, they’d be upset.
“I’m fine, I’ve had my cry,” said Molly. “I can’t believe it. But, thanks for calling, Scaachi, that was nice.”

When you realize someone that you didn’t know well is dead, there are a few choice things that happen: you think of how your friends would react if it were you, you think how you’d react if it were your friends, and you consider every regret you’ve held with you your entire life. After all, I feel like I just saw these girls in Mentorship class, annoying the hell out of me because they were pretty and popular and I couldn’t find a real reason to dislike any of them.

Over the weekend, more information was released. Finally, names and pictures of the girls came out and the rest of the country knew what Dr. E.P. Scarlett’s class of 2008 already knew. Memorial groups popped up, funeral arrangements were being made and families were making statements. And everyone was thinking, “poor Hannah.” Hannah was best friends with the three girls, and everyone who discussed their untimely death with me would wind the conversation down with, “Hannah, oh my god, she lost all her friends.”
Rachel thought that maybe them going all together was merciful. “Like they couldn’t live without each other, you know? They went as friends.” We all dig for explanations in time of grief, I suppose.

In this same time, Rachel and I figured out who the woman in the other car was, who the mother of the baby was. I feel uncomfortable revealing a name or any identity since the family has withheld the name for a reason, but the woman is related to another grad in the same year. The connection makes this accident more of a freak show than it was in the first place. Road and weather conditions were fine, they weren’t speeding and they weren’t drinking. How do you go like this?

This morning, I read a first-hand account by a woman who found the crash moments after it happened. She detailed finding one body in the middle of the road, broken bone poking out of her leg. Their cosmetics were strewn across the road and in the ditch. She found ballet flats and blush brushes and then the other two girls in the car. It was so ugly. And the photos of the car with the top ripped straight off and the front bumper destroyed. It’s lying in a ditch, with yellow and grey grass and a dusty sky. It’s so ugly.

There’s something horrific about watching a grotesque news story unravel itself before you when you already have the answers to the questions. It’s like watching the car crash in question in slow motion – you know where it’s going to go and you know it’s not ending anywhere good. The journalists must have been pariahs to the grieving families – looking for a lede, a picture, a detail on the girls that no other paper or network had. I watched interviews and read statements from girls I knew and I just hoped that the people talking to them were talking to them right.

Is this the career I’m picking? Is this the kind of work I want to do with myself? Digging into the ended lives of others, going after their family members for a quote or a close-up shot of them crying for what’s lost? I have to wonder if neglecting to report on something no longer makes it true. I don’t if reporters didn’t speak to the families, they would feel less grief. Nothing can fix this, you can only try to give them a platform.

Carnage is a sweet thing to know. It’s something you can bond over and feel with other people, because maybe you all hate that it happened to the same person or people. Knowing the premature death of a group of people is primal and hideous but it pulls people together for a disgusting and almost unwanted bond. I missed watching two guys beat the life out of each other because life had already been sucked away from four women. And everyone was friends, and I was part of it without even trying.

I don’t think I’m alone when I say I’d rather that we didn’t have to bond like this.

Big changes to grant and loan programs could brighten your financial future

You may have got a surprise in the mail this year. Upon opening that fateful letter that told you how much student loan funding you will receive, you might have found yourself the recipient of a non-repayable grant that you never asked for. If the free money seemed to good to be true, fear not: the brand new Canada Student Grant program kicked off in August 2009, and it means you’ll receive extra dough you don’t have to pay back later.

The 2009 fall semester brought big changes to federal student aid—including the new grant program, the scrapping of the Millennium Scholarship Foundation (the previous source of national bursaries and scholarships), and a new Repayment Assistance program to help student loan borrowers who are having trouble repaying their debts after graduation. If you’re one of the 350,000 students who borrow from the government each year, these changes affect you.

Since Aug. 1, when students apply for a national student loan, they are automatically considered for a grant as well. Full-time students deemed to be from low-income families receive an extra $250 per month; those from middle-income families receive an extra $100 per month, paid out at the beginning of each semester. (Information about family income levels, as well as the new grant and loan-repayment schemes, is available at canlearn.ca.)

According to Katherine Giroux-Bougard, national chairperson of the Canadian Federation of Students, an important distinction between the previous bursary program and the new grant program is that grant funding is determined according to family income rather than “need” (expenses minus resources). So no matter whether students have savings from their summer job or borrowed money from an uncle, they will get the grant as long as their family’s income is low enough.

Take this example: student A is from a low-income family and, after subtracting his meagre savings from his total university costs, he needs $3,500. He will receive $2,000 in grants and $1,500 in student loans. Student B is also from a low-income family and, having sold her car and worked her butt off during the summer, she needs only $1,400. She will receive a $2,000 grant and won’t have to take out student loans. If students qualify, they get the grant—simple as that.