Archive for Danielle Webb
Are students really going to university just to socialize?
Study that shows students learn little misses the point
It seems Canadian universities are paying closer attention to a study that came out of New York University a few weeks ago. The study argues that students aren’t going to university to learn anymore; they’re going there to socialize.
According to the report, students can spend less than half as many hours studying as they do socializing. The study seems to be making a statement that youth of today are unreliable and unruly, that they are less then the university graduates of a generation ago.
Todd Pettigrew has already pointed out that there is little reason to panic that the study’s finding would ring true in Canada. Recent comments from the vice-provost at the University of Western Ontario would back that statement up.
“For most things in life, you get out of something what you put into it,” John Doerksen said in Feb 3 press release. “It’s possible for students to find the easiest route to a diploma at the end of the day, but on the whole universities are serving populations well.”
Whenever you paint an entire population with the same brush, you risk painting some students the wrong colour. It’s a dangerous game to play. While the study found that “45 per cent of students made no significant improvement in critical thinking, reasoning or writing skills during the first two years, and 36 per cent showed no improvement after four years of schooling” more than half of students did make critical progress.
According to the study, students spent about 85 hours a week socializing or participating in extracurricular activities. Less than 40 hours per week were devoted to academics.
“This surprises me,” Doerksen continues. “From my own experience I would say that students are spending very significant amounts of time on their academic pursuits.”
Doerksen believes Canada’s post-secondary system is well-equipped to prepare students for the rest of their lives. “If a student wants to learn, there is an appropriate environment for that here,” he adds.
Taking away too much from a study that focuses on less than half of the students surveyed is a bad idea. Those students are perhaps not the best hiring choices for new companies, but the remaining 55 per cent of the student body are eager, learning and increasingly critically-minded people who will be the leaders of tomorrow.
By not showcasing the 55 per cent who are making a difference, the paper fails. If 45 per cent of students are not valuing lessons and skills learned in the classroom, they’ll hit their proverbial brick wall at some point. But lets not lose sight of the majority of students who are benefiting from post-secondary education.
Long-term financial planning is necessary
If schools teach students to plan ahead, why don’t they practice what they preach?
While the future of tuition in Nova Scotia is still a little uncertain, the New Brunswick government seems to be taking the opposite approach. N.B. wants to develop a four-year post-secondary funding plan to help students more easily plan how they will pay for school.
The ironic thing is that New Brunswick is saying they were inspired by the very memorandum of understanding that is currently up for debate in Nova Scotia. That province announcement today showed that the three-year tuition freeze is no longer a priority and tuition will be rising next year. By how much will likely vary from institution to institution and from year to year. Not something that is all that helpful to students trying to planning ahead.
Marilyn More, N.S.’s minister of advanced education, said the government will be capping tuition increases at three per cent. This means the government still doesn’t have a long-term strategy for post-secondary education; they just want to ensure it doesn’t balloon up out of control again.
It’s no secret that university tuition is high, and growing faster than it ever has. A little stability will make financial planning for students a lot easier. While this proposal is a good start, the problem comes in four years when the deal is up and the province’s whims change again.
And students always lose in that scenario.
OSAP ‘app’ a load of . . .
Government is trying to stay hip with a crowd it doesn’t understand
The Ontario government has released a mobile application for their student aid program — or so they say. In reality, the app is not much of an app at all. And I’m not just talking about its sparse functionality.
Put simply, the “app” is a mobile version of the OSAP website. When students visit ontario.ca/osapmobile on their smartphones, they will be redirected to a mobile-friendly login page. Once inside students are able to check up on the status of their current year’s application, and nothing else.
If students really want to pretend it’s an app, they can bookmark the site and save it as an icon on their phone. Sounds … not helpful at all.
All this initiative seems to do is show just how out of touch the government actually is with students. According to Annette Phillips, director of communications for the ministry of training, colleges and universities, the initiative is currently in a “pilot stage” and they plan to make improvements based on students’ feedback.
“The mobile app is an additional step the ministry has taken to try and reach students where they are and make the process a bit easier,” Phillips said in an email to Canadian University Press.
Huh? You haven’t made anything easier for students at all. In fact, all this does is let students check on the status of their loan wherever and whenever they want. The problem is this isn’t a burning question a student needs answered while they’re walking to class nor is it something they need to check in on over and over again. These are two features that make mobile applications really useful to people.
It seems to me that getting student input prior to wasting money and time on a piece of technology that I’m betting no Ontario student will use would have been a better idea. I have to wonder just who the government consulted on this project and why something as simple as repayment options and maybe a way to connect to a student’s bank wasn’t included in the original plan.
Basic day-to-day functionality is key to making an app like this useful. Look at banking apps, for example. You can check your balance, transfer funds between accounts and pay bills all on the go. Even these basic ideas would have made this announcement something exciting, or at least something interesting.
As it stands, any developer worth their salt could have spent an afternoon turning out a better, more useful product than what the government put out this week. Why spend the time releasing several small improvements over the next few months when you could have done it right the first time?
iPad not ready for the classroom
Students still need great teachers, not just great tech
Forty students at the University of Notre Dame were randomly pulled from class and told they had been selected as participants in a pilot project, if they were willing, on the effectiveness of iPads and e-books in education. To no one’s surprise, they all volunteered for the project.
The students reported at the end of a year that they had more fun in their classes and felt that they had learned more than they might have without the iPad and e-books at their disposal.
What’s interesting though is the students also reported that they found the highlighting tool to be clumsy, bemoaned the poor implementation of a note-taking tool and a full 20 per cent of them said, “The iPad lacks important functions/tools that are available with a traditional textbook or other device.”
Despite that, though, many said they were “willing to wait for improvements.”
I’ve already written about the costs of these devices when compared to existing education models involving notebooks, pens and laptops. Even the researchers in this study argue that the cost of participation — buying the iPad in addition to e-books — is “prohibitive for students.”
But what should be noticed is the fact that a full 20 per cent of students found that the technology wasn’t ready for educational use yet. They found that the iPad lacked the tools old technology offered so easily — highlighting and taking notes. Scribbling in the margins was impossible for them.
A 2008 study looking at how quickly video and other multi-media technology was being incorporated into mobile devices found that a lot of the early adoption was all about the novelty of the idea and not about its functionality. But as the availability of video on demand became normalized, consumers began looking for a reason to consume. They wanted it to be useful, personal and meaningful. When it failed in that regard, they tuned out.
“The videos were used to fill up empty slots when waiting for something: Queuing at the cashier while shopping or while having a break from homework. The users talked about the novelty wearing off: A few news broadcasts and cartoons were not experiences as inspiring enough as content in the long run,” the study reads.
And that is what the iPad risks becoming for educational institutions if it doesn’t begin offering real, student-centred education products. The classes students remember most, the ones they value most, are not those with the most interesting subject matter, they’re the ones with the best teachers who are most capable of making any subject matter interesting.
The iPad and other tablet devices are not substitutions for textbooks. They are new tools that good teachers can use to further interact with their students. Until educational institutions recognize this, tablets risk becoming just another novelty product.
U of T students push for bigger governance role
General Assembly created to challenge admin on accountability, funding and corporatization
Students, staff and faculty at the University of Toronto are taking a stand against an administration they believe puts corporate interests ahead of students’. The first ever U of T General Assembly was held on Jan. 19 to discuss how to breach the university’s governing processes and help to ensure their needs are met.
A Facebook press release stated the meeting’s aims:
“At the first ever U of T General Assembly, members of the university community will demand that the administration stand with students, workers, and faculty, rather than with corporations, private donors, and a provincial government that fails to adequately support higher education. Participants of the UTGA will map out an alternative direction for the University — one that ensures access and improved learning conditions for students, safe and dignified working conditions for workers, and the protection of academic freedom for all.”
Topics discussed ranged from the controversial proposed flat fees system to the development of the Munk School of Global Affairs, a relationship the group is calling to come to an end.
According to live tweets from the Varsity’s Dylan Robertson, several working groups were established to focus on key areas of concern, including economic accessibility and funding, governance and accountability, and the university’s move towards corporatization. Tweets also declared the room to be too crowded to hear the discussion at times.
The group plans to meet again the week following reading break in February.
It’s refreshing to see so much mobilization on a campus. Whether you side with the administration or the students and staff, you have to admire the tenacity of a group of people fighting for the type of education and university experience they want to receive. How often do students go about their academic lives, quietly cursing their administration or students’ union for an unpopular decision, without ever doing anything about it?
It reminds me of the student strikes that occur ever so often in Quebec, the last one in 2005 when almost 200,000 students boycotted their studies until $103 million in the provincial budget was shifted from student loans back to bursaries. It will be interesting to see if the University of Toronto’s general assembly can garner the same kind of clout with its administration, and how things will unfold over the next few months.
Universities losing autonomy
Who has responsibility for education when students are paying the tab?
The Ontario government is taking enormous steps to catch up to the rest of country by allowing students to more easily transfer from university to university, from university to college and from college to college.
It’s a great effort and one that is nothing but beneficial to students by offering them more opportunities, more flexibility and more chances to figure out what it is they want to do with their lives.
But the trend it represents is perhaps more troubling.
The British Columbia government recently made a major effort to streamline research roles and tradesperson training in the province. By separating those streams into two respective ministries, the government found they were able to better control their output and economic contributions.
While the Ontario government isn’t quite moving in that direction, the increasingly centrally managed university environment in the province is a sign of the times.
More than 50 years ago, universities in Canada were largely autonomous. Many still had strong ties to the various churches that founded the cities and town in which the institutions were founded. Others were in the process of aggressive expansion, taking advantage of a glut of government money in the post-war years.
It was a time when universities ran themselves, but governments paid for it. Tuition was cheap, and education attained for education’s sake.
Over the past 50 years, though, and accelerating through the 1990s, the reverse has become true.
Universities are increasingly funded through tuition fees, residence fees, meal plans, bookstore sales and other private ventures. In Ontario, government subsidies now make up less than half of total university revenue.
Despite this trend, though, government is taking an increasingly active role in university management. From regulating degree-granting abilities, regulating fee increases, regulating administrative structure, government is now also involved in centralized application processes, student loan programs and centralized degree transfer programs.
Government is slowly taking over post-secondary education, but asking students to pay for it. And as post-secondary becomes increasingly necessary to functioning in the larger world, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
A problem with free education
Post-grad obligations for medical students could create a two-tiered system
Is free education worth the years of service students are obliged to pay back? In the past couple of months, two grant programs have emerged in Manitoba with the aim of delivering access to key services in otherwise under-serviced parts of the province.
Both medical students and law students will now be able to apply for grants that will pay for the majority of their education. In return, though, they must spend their first years as doctors or lawyers in remote areas of the province, where access to legal and medical services is hard to attain.
While the government’s and the universities’ hearts are in the right place for wanting to help residents with accessibility issues while helping students graduate debt-free, I have to wonder if the deal will seem worthwhile once students are graduated and working through their contracts. How many students will have to give up great opportunities elsewhere to fulfill their educational obligations?
A program like this can very easily make it more difficult for low-income students to become big players in their field.
For example, if a student takes advantage of Manitoba’s medical grant program to its full extent, they will have paid for a huge portion of their education, but owe two-and-a-half years of service as soon as they finish their residency.
A student who finishes their undergraduate degree at the age of 22, finishes medical school at 26, could very well be over 30 before they finish their residency and begin paying back their time to the province.
A kid with a dream of becoming a thoracic surgeon — a highly-competitive position — will end up taking a break of nearly three years at the exact moment they are eligible to begin applying for jobs in their field. Instead, they’ll spend that time in the outback practicing family medicine. Meanwhile, their peers from wealthier backgrounds who did not require the government’s help to go through school will leapfrog into those jobs.
Family medicine changes lives. It provides extraordinarily valuable services to everyday people. There is also a significant doctor shortage in rural areas and that’s a problem that needs to be addressed. But programs like this, if not properly monitored, could end up creating a two-tiered healthcare system, one where wealthy students get the choice jobs, and poorer students make do with what’s left after their service has been repaid.
Entrance stress
Do grade 12 students freak themselves out too easily?
Note: This post has been edited below.
Ditch the plan. Throw it in the dustbin, tie up the bag and take it to the curb. It’s not doing anyone any good.
It’s January. University applications for high school students are due next week. But the first round of acceptance letters have already gone out, so panic is settling in as the rat race kicks into high gear. High school students are now comparing letters, entrance scholarships and who was admitted where.
But the fact is this: Those who have done well to date are more likely to continue to do well. Those who have done poorly are less likely to get into university. And the statistics back it up.
The race has already been run – now it’s just a question of who gets to run the next leg.
In 2005, approximately 57,000 high school students were admitted to an Ontario university. Considering more than 328,000 high school students applied applications were received for university programs that same year, acceptance is anything but a given. In Ontario, students can apply to three schools for a flat rate of $120, and each additional school costs $40. The Globe and Mail reports that the average student submits 4.4 applications.
But that raises the real issue. Is it true that only 17 77 per cent of applicants are qualified to attend university? Or is it more likely that, despite the premier’s investment in post-secondary education there are still likely qualified students being turned away?
The situation is improving. Investments are being made. But for the time being, the annual high school panic session seems warranted.
Digital education will be expensive for students
How much is on students’ shoulders, and how much on the institutions’?
The greatest barrier to digital course material is accessibility. Not the ability to use the technology — that comes naturally to most students — but the ability to afford it.
In 1996, as the Internet was rapidly taking over our lives, Acadia University introduced a laptop program. Every student was given a laptop and expected to care for it during their time at school.
The idea was to give students the opportunity to take part in everything that modern technology had to offer. It worked, after ten years the program was still alive and expanded.
Now universities are gearing up for another big technological push. As universities across Canada try to deal with a fee increase from Access Copyright, some are pushing away from traditional paper course packs and textbooks and toward electronic course materials. In short, ebooks are taking over the world.
But while course packs are more expensive than ebooks, the cost of participation for ebooks is far higher. And students will bear that price.
To buy a course pack, you need to spent $50-100 at the bookstore and know how to read. To buy an ebook, you also need a reader like an iPad, Kindle or Kobo. These are expensive pieces of equipment.
When Acadia launched its laptop program in 1996, its tuition rose considerably to reflect the increased costs of participation, becoming the highest in the country and forcing the university to reconsider the validity of its position, especially in the face of widespread laptop adoption among its students as time passed.
History is now repeating itself.
Michael Geist, a Canada Research Chair in Internet and e-commerce law, wrote in the Ottawa Citizen that there will be short-term pain for long-term gain:
“Yet the longer term benefits are enormous since publishers and authors will continue to be compensated through mechanisms such as CKRN, and Canadian higher education will be able to leverage their massive investments in technology to provide students with better, more engaging and interactive learning experiences.”
What schools, like the University of British Columbia, need to do is subsidize students’ technology upgrades to help ease them into the new academic consumption norm. Once the norm is more widespread, which seems inevitable, these subsidies can end.
If students are expected to shoulder short-term pain for their long-term gain, universities can reasonably be expected to do the same by helping their students through the transition.
Developing my ‘education capital’
Why democratizing education is important
I was an FGS, or first-generation student. This means my parents didn’t attend a post-secondary institution. And according to a recent study published in the Canadian Journal of Higher Education, it was unlikely for someone like me to even attend university at all.
The study revolves around this idea of “education capital.” It goes something like this: As you study, you gather education capital and it accumulates in your house. Then you have kids and you’re able to pass it on to them.
Children who are raised in households with high education capital are more likely to attend post-secondary and continue to build their own education capital. If your parents didn’t pursue post-secondary education, your odds of doing so were just cut in half.
But there are other ways your education capital can also drop. Living in rural areas or coming from a low-income background, for example, also reduce your odds of attending post-secondary.
The interesting part is what happens when these students defy the odds and attend anyway, though.
In contrast to the study’s main thesis, as I went through high school — the oldest of nine children — to attend university or not was never a question. My only question was where. In the fall of 2005, I was off to St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, N.S. and four years later I left with my bachelor’s degree in history. I didn’t know how I would finance my education or what I would do with my degree afterward, but I knew this was an important step for me to take.
Once anyone makes the choice to attend post-secondary, the study says all the traditional barriers of cost, classism and accessibility melt away. No matter their background, any single student has roughly the same odds of graduating and getting their degree as any other student.
So the question then becomes: How do we get other first-generation students to make the choice to attend?
The culture around what’s accessible is changing. While it’s expensive, and many go deep into debt, university is no longer seen as only for the elite. It’s a place where anyone who wants to pursue an education can. I see this change happening in my own family. An aunt and myself are the only ones who currently have a university degree, but the rest of my high-school graduated siblings are now also attending post-secondary. And the others are making plans too.
Without meaning to, I think my aunt and I helped to boost the education capital in my own family, even though neither of us live in the same province anymore.
And universities are capitalizing on what the study is calling the “democratization” of education. I moved into an all-first-year residence building in fall 2005 that was designed to make my transition to university life easier on me. More and more universities are developing “first-year experience” support programs. Others have bursaries and grants specifically targeted at first-generation students.
Regardless of all the current barriers to accessible post-secondary education, I think we can all agree that an educated population is invaluable and fostering this attitude among all types of people is only a good thing.
What is the appropriate level of discipline?
Posting pictures on Facebook is always hazardous, but can the response go too far?
In November, a Kansas student taking part in a lab for her nursing school posed for a photo with a human placenta. That photo, like so many do, wound up on Facebook. But this photo got the soon-to-be graduate kicked out of school.
“Your demeanor and lack of professional behavior surrounding this event was considered a disruption to the learning environment and did not exemplify the professional behavior that we expect in the nursing program,” Jeanne Walsh, director of nursing at the college, wrote in a letter to Doyle Byrnes and quoted in the article by the Kansas City Star.
It should be no surprise to anyone who posts anything on Facebook these days that bad things can come of it. Posting photos to the Internet offers the vast public curiosity a window on poor decisions and creates a permanent record.
But that the web creates an enormously convenient mechanism to track those who do wrong by ensnaring them in their own ignorance is beyond the point. In this case, it appears that Johnson County Community College is grossly over-reacting.
Four students were kicked out of school for taking photos with the placenta, which did not leave the tray in which it was presented to the students. The photo was on the social networking site for a total of three hours. When a school official told the students that the photo was unacceptable, they took it down immediately.
Byrnes has since closed her Facebook account entirely.
She is now seeking an injunction against the college that would allow her to continue her studies before she is married and moves out of the state this summer.
The school, however, is calling it “lesson hard learned.” Hard learned, indeed. But in this case, it sounds more like hard taught.
What the four students did was in poor taste. But the lab in which the photos were taken was supervised. They took the photo down as soon as they were told and have apologized profusely. This is hardly an incident worthy of the expulsion of four students, especially considering they complied with the college’s wishes following the posting. The college should be using this case as an example to ensure it doesn’t happen again, and not punishing students excessively for a little harmless fun.
Ontario has student aid backwards
Why is increasing student debt more important than lowering tuition?
A series of adjustments made to the Ontario Student Assistance Program this week are really just raising the bar to service enjoyed in other provinces and doesn’t even come close to the assistance provided in the rest of the country, Newfoundland and Labrador, in particular.
While it’s great to see Ontario’s student assistance finally standing in line with the rest of the country, having six months interest-free after graduation is not going to make much a difference when you’re already going to be repaying debt for many years.
In August 2009, the Newfoundland and Labrador government eliminated interest on student loans entirely. The province later said that students in repayment during the first year of the program collectively saved $5 million.
“By eliminating interest rate charges, the provincial government has responded to a call by students and graduates who are struggling to pay off their student loans,” Daniel Smith, Newfoundland and Labrador chairperson of the Canadian Federation of Students, said in a press release on Aug. 2. “Increased funding to improve access and reduce student debt is a sound investment in the collective future of our province.”
A tuition freeze as well as non-repayable grants are also a reality in Newfoundland and Labrador. That, to me, seems like a province taking their future seriously.
Meanwhile, the Ontario government’s post-secondary plan has been a little contradictory this year.
Back in March, the government announced it would allow tuition to continue to rise at the maximum of five per cent for the next two years. Now they are pretending to help students pay for it by making it easier for them to take on debt.
Rather than earmarking an additional $81 million for student aid in the province, Ontario might have taken a progressive stand on the matter and introduced another tuition freeze for less than that amount. Not to mention using the extra money that “streamlining the process will save,” which is estimated at “more than 10,000 work hours in student aid offices, improve efficiency in evaluating and processing applications, and reduce back-to-school line-ups.”
In a province with the highest average tuition in the country, bringing the initial price tag in line with the rest of the country should be a bigger priority than making it easier to increase student debt.
Second-class students
Munk School of Global Affairs sends students to the side doors
Move to the back of the bus. Give your vote to your husband. Let them eat cake. Now, use the side door only, please.
History is littered with examples of the powerful using their wealth and influence to push the little guy to his knees. Now the University of Toronto is falling in line. U of T is accepting tens of millions of dollars in private donations to create the Munk School of Global Affairs. But in so doing, they are letting Canada’s elite decide how the university’s lowly everyday students will be treated.
Tucked away on the on the bottom half of page 14 of the agreement between the U of T and the Munk Charitable Foundation, sits this paragraph:
“The main entrance of the Heritage Mansion will be a formal entrance reserved only for senior staff and visitors to the School and the CIC. Usual and customary traffic for any occupants of any future developments adjoining the Heritage Mansion will be through one or more entrances on Devonshire Place.”
The agreement also notes that the building will be the headquarters for the new school and at least 75 per cent of the building is to be reserved for that purpose.
This paragraph of the agreement makes the Munk Foundation seem more interested in the appearance of austerity, than the delivery of a high quality academic program. But that could be too generous. They could be more interested in the significant tax breaks their donation offers one of Canada’s wealthiest couple.
Either way, by reserving the gilded front entrance of their new school for senior staff and guests to be impressed, the school is sending a very clear message to students: This is now a class-based system, and students are at the bottom of the pile.
Alone, the move could seem innocuous. But so did asking a segment of society to move to the back of the bus. The University of Toronto needs to make sure that, in accepting the donation from the Munk Foundation, they are not also allowing donors to dictate how students should be treated.
Post-secondary is closing the wage gap
Are single, educated women driving this change?
New Statistics Canada data shows that the wage gap between men and women is shrinking. It’s not closed yet, but it’s shrinking is certainly cause for some celebration.
Not surprisingly, though, once you break down the data, education is at the heart of the change.
A few months ago, I wrote about the rising female enrollment in post-secondary education and how that was being mirrored in how long people are delaying marriage.
Now, Statistics Canada is also correlating that trend with rising women’s income levels in comparison to men.
In 2008, men could more than double their average annual income by attending a post-secondary institution. For women, the difference between high school and post-secondary education was more than triple annual income levels.
And as more women than ever are attending post-secondary institutions, they are choosing to achieve their life goals on their own terms. To do this, they’re demanding equal wages to their male peers.
This equalization is happening quickly. Between 2000 and 2008, the average man’s income rose seven per cent. In the same period, women’s income rose 13 per cent.
Men still out-earn women by a considerable margin. For every dollar a post-secondary educated man earns, a woman can still only hope to earn $0.68.
But so long as women’s economic gains continue to outstrip men’s on the order of 85 per cent, the difference will shrink quickly. With any luck, my children will look on the wage gap with the same incredulity as we now look upon resistance to the suffrage movement.
Do you believe your own hype?
A recent U.S. survey has redefined patting yourself on the back, and it’s only going to hurt students
A recent study found that up to 90 per cent of grads at post-secondary institutions in the United States saw value in their education, and found that post-secondary education had prepared them well for the workforce. Up to 97 per cent of grads at some schools said that, while the school with the lowest approval was still a staggering 80 per cent.
Surveys like this are great when it comes to approving the status quo. Take a small group of campuses — in this case, only 22 — then have the study administered by a larger group of post-secondary institutions. Limit the survey to graduates — so as to prevent having the results influenced by dropouts and students who transferred out — and the self-selected group of universities will get glowing reviews from the students who succeeded most thoroughly from their education.
Strangely enough, these successful students — over a third of whom said that post-secondary institutions are adequately preparing their students for the workforce — also agreed that cost was not an issue in their education. They also advocated for deregulation of tuition, as more than half of the respondents said that it was up to the individual institution to keep tuition fees affordable, not the state or federal governments.
Surveys like this present obvious selection bias that endangers the future of post-secondary accessibility.
By leaving out future students, dropouts, transfer students and those who just couldn’t hack it, the study has by design omitted negative views, views that would require universities to examine themselves more carefully and become more inclusive.
By limiting the survey to graduates, the survey could also be picking up a kind of buyer’s remorse. The University of Brooklyn notes that psychological theory exists to support the idea:
“After making a purchase, a consumer is nervous about the brand choice especially if a great deal of effort and/or money is involved. The consumer will try to reassure herself that she made the right choice. She might pay more attention to the ads of the selected brand than brands she did not buy after the purchase as a means of reassuring herself that she made a good choice. Sometimes, post-purchase dissonance is referred to as buyer’s remorse.”
If there are some graduates who participated in this survey who were not confident about their choice of post-secondary education, this theory supports the idea that they could have become more supportive of their education over time.
This is not to say that there is no value in education. Not in the least. But there is room for improvement in many areas: accessibility, cost, job preparation and inclusiveness, to name a few. If surveys like this are the data that institutions are using to gauge their success, they are purposefully painting themselves a rose-coloured picture. It is both inaccurate and unfair.
The American Council on Education is right to conduct surveys to see where they stand in the world. But those surveys should be accurate and represent all students. They should not be self-pandering press release material that supports the status-quo.
How do you stand up for your rights?
Students in Toronto, Calgary are proving that authority still rests with the governed
This has been a good year for students wielding power over their administrations. A high school student in Toronto, suspended for speaking his mind to the administration, got the school and local media on his side and had his record cleared. Two students at the University of Calgary criticized a professor online, but a court cleared them.
It hardly even matters what the students at the University of Calgary were speaking out about. As it has it, the kick-off was a relatively childish Facebook group about a disliked professor. But it quickly turned into a story about a university pushing its students around arbitrarily without regard for their rights or due process. The students saw this and asked a court to side with them. On Oct. 12, 2010, the Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench saw fit to do so, ruling that the students’ Charter rights had been infringed.
In Toronto, the situation never escalated quite as far, but was no less dramatic. After a 17-year-old soccer player voiced his concerns about support for the school’s teams at an assembly, his school banned him from athletic activities and suspended him for two days. The heavy-handed and blatant act of censorship did not go unchallenged. Parents, fellow students and media outlets across the city quickly rose to his defence. Inside of two weeks the school’s administration backed down, reinstating the student’s privileges and allowing him to return to class.
He’s now trying to expunge the suspension from his record as he prepares to apply to university, and it seems he has support on his side again. While his principal has said it won’t be an easy feat, if precedence is any indicator, I don’t think he’ll have a problem realizing his latest ambition.
In a year where we’ve heard much about heavy-handed government from WikiLeaks, G20 abuses and corporate scandal, that the power of the people can still be wielded, and wielded with courage, is itself encouraging.
These are students who showed incredible courage and wisdom. They recognized that they had been wronged, and recognized the most effective avenues for correcting those wrongs. But what these examples demonstrated most effectively was the power of the people when they come together.
When media outlets and hundreds of supporters rally behind a cause, it cannot be ignored. A mentor of Russell Crowe’s Gladiator said it best: “Win the crowd and you will win your freedom.”
Even Barbie in this summer’s Toy Story 3 was on to this idea. “Authority should derive from the consent of the governed, not from threat of force!” she declares in the film.
And while there is much to be sorrowful in this world, as 2010 nears its end we can be thankful that it is still our consent that is required above all else in government. And we are still free to withdraw that consent, whenever we see fit, so long as we have a few friends to stand with us.
Why your business degree is like an app store
Call it democratizing education if you want, but Facebook MBA is going to make a lot of money.
These days volume is everything. It’s not enough to have a great idea, it has to be a great idea with mass-market potential. That’s the entire business model for smartphone apps like Angry Birds. Alone, a $0.99 app isn’t a strong revenue stream. But when it goes viral, and tens of millions of users start to download the product, it becomes a revolution.
That seems to be the idea behind The London School of Business and Finance’s new Facebook MBA initiative.
With the launch of these MBA classes, the school is allowing students anywhere to check out their program, free of charge, on Facebook before deciding to enrol. Essentially, they are letting prospective students take their product for a test drive before any commitment is made.
“It is the first online MBA, which will be free to all until the optional point of assessment for qualification … there will be [hundreds of] hours of free study resources available to all users, including 80 hours of high definition video content. Unlike all other MBAs, no fees will be required up front allowing students to save for exams or to pay when it suits them financially,” states a press release about the program.
Is it the democratization of education? Or is it the mass-marketing of course materials that will draw in millions in revenue once those students decide to become certified?
By making these classes free, the discussions easily accessible and the course materials available for download, the LSBF is doing more to promote mass business education than almost anything to date. And that their certification program is a fraction of the price of Queen’s University or the University of Toronto only amplifies the draw, which are $65,000 and $75,000, respectively.
What young people interested in an MBA will see is free study opportunities with a cheap certification exam at the end of the line.
Just like with apps, while $23,000 per exam isn’t going to cover the cost of preparing the system and running it, getting thousands of more students interested in the program than could possibly fit in lecture halls will solve the problem through simple volume.
Maybe their new slogan should be: “There’s a Facebook page for that.”
Did Canada’s first hazing death happen at STU?
Hazing may or may not have killed a student, but answers are desperately needed
In late October, a St. Thomas University student was found dead in his building’s stairwell after a weekend party with his volleyball teammates. Questions began swirling immediately as to the circumstances of this tragic event, some of which have been answered, many of which the university is dancing around.
The death of 21-year-old Andrew Bartlett has been ruled an accident, but police have confirmed that alcohol was a factor in the events that led up to the fourth-year student’s fatal fall. The university has now suspended the men’s volleyball team for the rest of the year after hazing rituals were discovered at the same party Bartlett attended the night he died.
But no one will say if the two events are related in any way. Both the university and the Fredericton police are choosing their words very carefully.
In a press conference on Thursday, university president Dennis Cochrane outlined the findings of an internal investigation into the matter: The party involved drinking games where the rookie players were required to pay more for alcohol than team veterans. Though Cochrane says no evidence was found that anyone on the team was forced to drink, it’s clear a hierarchy was at play.
“There was a very clear identification of rookies, very clearly a treatment of them different than other members of the team,” he said. Cochrane went on to say that the events of Oct. 23 fit the university’s description of hazing.
While I realize the need for sensitivity in this matter, and I can sympathize with what Bartlett’s family, friends and teammates are going through, this is a question that needs to be answered and an issue that needs to be addressed. Two scenarios could have been at play. Either Bartlett was simply having fun with his friends, drank too much and a tragic accident occurred that could have happened any night of the year. Or he was trying desperately to impress his new teammates and live up to their standards. The key will be determining whether or not he would have drank the same way if the environment he was in was different.
If the hazing and team party are related to Bartlett’s fall and death, the entire story becomes a dark mark in our history. He very well may be the first hazing-related death in this country, and that is something that needs to be addressed more seriously than simply suspending a team for the year.
Hazing in Canada has gone beyond embarrassing headlines and has potentially crossed over into a realm we’ve never had to deal with before. We’ve never had a hazing-related death before. If Bartlett died because of a hazing ritual, then this needs to be public knowledge so we can figure out how to change this culture immediately before more people die.
Why broadening gender studies is necessary
It is no longer just about the women’s movement
Princeton University is taking the right approach when it comes to revamping their women’s studies department. The program, previously known as Study of Women and Gender, will now be called Gender and Sexuality Studies after a unanimous vote of the department’s faculty.
The latter half of 2009 saw many similar moves by Canadian universities. Queen’s University renamed their program Gender Studies, while Simon Fraser University’s program is now called Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies. Catherine Murray, SFU’s program chair, hit the nail on the head regarding the titular change movement:
“We’re not abandoning women’s studies, or saying the women’s movement is dead. We’re saying things are changing. It’s about moving forward, staying ahead of the game and recognizing the need to include broader discussions surrounding gender,” she told the National Post in late January.
The National Post found itself in hot water a day later when their editorial board tried to claim that “these angry, divisive and dubious programs are simply being renamed to make them appear less controversial.” The national response only proved that discussions around gender are still necessary.
Women’s studies are important, and the firestorm that surrounded the Post in January proved just that. But there’s also room for other discussions that surround gender and sexuality to be addressed as well. Princeton’s latest move is showing us that it has no intention of reducing its focus on women; they are simply including more voices. The department is keeping most of its original course names, but adding some new ones to address a wider scope of gender issues that are part of modern discussions.
It’s about evolution.
“The newly renamed Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies at Princeton will continue to address each phase of the field’s development, maintaining its historical commitment to the specificity of women’s experience while offering feminist analytic tools across disciplines,” program director Jill Dolan told the Daily Princetonian.
Women’s studies programs first came on the scene over 40 years ago — the first at San Diego State University in 1970 — to address many of the same concerns that are facing other areas of the gender discussion now — gay, lesbian and transgender people are just some examples of the groups whose voices now need to be heard. At first, it was the result of pressure from women’s liberation movements to include female perspectives in education. Modern discussions around “Don’t ask, don’t tell” and “It gets better” are proof that gender discussions are still an important part of our daily lives.
“The first women’s studies programs were created as scholars attempted to re-examine history, literature, anthropology, psychology and other subjects, and to explore the missing perspective,” explains an article on About.com. And today, it’s more missing perspectives that are propelling the expansion of gender programs at universities.
Margaret, a Maclean’s commenter, sums it up beautifully: “I would love to see the day come when women’s contributions (and the contributions of people of colour, alternative sexualities, etc etc) are given the same airtime as the contributions of white men. Until that day comes, we need programs such as women’s studies and first nations studies to bring other perspectives to higher education.”
And while detractors like the National Post’s editorial board will always be around to try and stop those perspectives, universities are right in rising above their ignorance and trying to lend a hand to bring them along for the ride.
Donations are driving universities forward
Policies need to be in place to make sure academic voices aren’t lost in the shuffle
Two professors at the University of Toronto are concerned that philanthropic gifts are doing more to determine academic priorities than the school’s own academic faculties. And their concerns aren’t completely unfounded.
Following a large donation to the Munk School of Global Affairs, the university included in the donor agreement a line that announced “international studies is a top academic priority of the university.”
But according to professors Paul Hamel and John Valleau, that was never discussed in the traditional academic circles.
“Who decided that?” Hamel asked the Varsity, the student newspaper at the University of Toronto.
“Departments will put through their academic plans that they have an idea and we find ways of doing it. An academic priority is identified on the ground,” Misak added to the newspaper. “The idea that donors are driving academic priorities is crazy, just crazy.”
But the shift towards making philanthropy a significant source of income for post-secondary institutions is still new. Only in 2007, the head of fundraising at the University of Ottawa speculated that donations could become a permanent fixture of university priorities.
“It’s become a permanent feature of how universities do their job,” David Mitchell told The Globe and Mail. “The machinery of fundraising has come of age at universities in the last generation. I don’t think it is about to end.”
And since then, the amount of donations accepted by universities has been growing steadily.
While still representing a low total number in their overall budgets, donations now represent the second-fastest growing income source for universities, growing an average of nearly 11 per cent a year between 1997 and 2007.
And with hundreds of millions of dollars lining up at their door, it’s hard for universities to say no. That’s the problem Hamel and Valleau are now worried about.
While the University of Toronto’s donor agreement specifically affirms the academic freedom and freedom of speech of their faculty, that these two professors are concerned is reason for concern itself.
The way academic priorities are decided needs to be transparent to the academic community. It’s through this transparency that faculty can feel free to bring forward their own priorities and contribute in innovative ways to the university community.
If professors feel that priority setting is solely the domain of higher bodies, disenfranchised faculty will begin to wear down the institution’s morale.
It’s important to remember that donors don’t always get to set the priorities. As Ron Joyce, co-founder of Tim Hortons, told The Globe and Mail: “There is no such thing as a bad cause really, but you have to focus your efforts,” he said. “I’ve been very fortunate. I have an obligation to give something back.”
Universities have a strong history in Canada of academic independence, important discoveries and developing brilliant minds. Donations are a necessary part of this process, but shouldn’t determine priorities. The University of Toronto needs to demonstrate to its academic faculty that this is still the case, or they will face increasing scrutiny from disenfranchised academic leaders.
