All Posts Tagged With: "Canadian Millennium Scholarship Foundation"
Stay in school, it pays: study
Millennium Foundation says a degree is a great investment, but other studies raise a few caveats
If you have a university degree, you can expect to earn $746,000 more over your working life than someone with only a high school diploma. The information is contained in a study released today by the Canadian Millennium Scholarship Foundation, authored by Joseph Berger and Andrew Parkin. The authors also found that Canadians with only a high school diploma are two and a half times more likely to be unemployed than a university graduate. College graduates enjoy higher earnings than those with only a high school education, but the earning gap is not as wide and their lifetime payoff is only about half that of university graduates.
Bergin and Parker say they wrote this report in in order to counter “a series of recent suggestions that somehow we have too many [post-secondary] students in Canada, not too few.” They write that “the evidence about the positive returns to post-secondary education is so well-known that it seems unnecessary to review it again.” There’s pretty much no refuting that, if you take the income levels of all those with a university education and compare it to the incomes of all those with only high school, university looks is one heck of a good investment. College similarly looks like a good investment, but university appears to be a much better one. A few years ago, I opened our annual Rankings issue with an article entitled “The Best Investment Money Can Buy.” I estimated, based on a less thorough analysis of Statscan data than Berger and Parkin offer, that the return on a university degree was about $1 million dollars in extra lifetime earnings.
I still hold to the view that university offer serious economic benefits to students and society — but I have some caveats. Education is the fount of progress: social, scientific and economic. A more skilled society will be a more prosperous and successful society. But the more I look at our higher education system, the more frequently I see disconnects between the true statement “our society needs more educated people” and the not necessarily equivalent statement that “our society needs more people with university degrees.” The latter should equal the former, but unfortunately that’s not always the case. There’s lots of evidence that an increasing number of kids are simply being pushed through the system: they may get a university degree (and before that, a high school diploma) without having learned anywhere near as much as the credential suggests they should have. A few weeks ago, a chemistry professor told me about how some students in his third-year and fourth-year classes — students who are majoring in chemistry — never learned the most basic elements of the first-year material. He’s not sure how they made it in to upper-year courses; they’re not educated enough to be called scientists. But they’re going to get a B.Sc. What exactly is their degree worth? Somewhat less than the ideal.
A number of commentators, such as professors James Cote and Anton Allahar, authors of this book (and a related blog) have said that we are lowering standards in order to raise enrolment, devaluing higher education in the process. I’ve got a lot of sympathy for Cote and Allahar’s argument that we are putting too much emphasis on getting more people into higher education, and too little emphasis on what they do once they get there — what they actually learn. Cote and Allahar similarly point to a focus on credentials over learning in some high school systems — which deal with weak students by shoving them through the system regardless of actual performance or learning, raising everyone’s grades, raising graduation rates and giving the illusion of educational progress. More knowledge/skill/education are good things, for the individual and for our society and economy. However, we can’t just assume that more schooling, of whatever type, in whatever field and of whatever quality, equals education/learning/skills. Our system should aim to make those linkages — and this is where Parkin/Berger and Cote/Allahar surely agree. We can’t automatically assume that more people with credentials (whether that is a high school diploma or a B.A.) equals more people with knowledge and skills that lead to higher returns to themselves and to society.
Aboriginal, first-generation students face barriers to higher education: Riddell
Three day conference gathers 350 people from around the world to discuss student access and success
Although Canada has made progress in expanding the number of students pursuing post-secondary education, there are still major hurdles for many, says Norman Riddell, CEO of the Canadian Millennium Scholarship Foundation. “That progress is uneven; some segments of our society do not have access,” he said in his opening remarks at an international post-secondary education conference this week.
In a nondescript building near Markham more than 350 academics, educators, policy makers, and lobbyists have gathered for a three-day international conference to discuss and exam the issues surrounding access to post-secondary education. The “Neither a moment nor a mind to waste” conference is jointly hosted by the Canadian Millennium Scholarship Foundation and the European Access Network. The international conference includes experts from Australia, United Kingdom, Norway, and the United States.
“It is especially important to create strategies to improve access to post-secondary education,” Riddell said, adding that Canada cannot continue to have large segments of our population, especially Aboriginal peoples, not attending any post-secondary education “with knowledge more important in everyday work life.”
He says one of the main challenges is providing information to first-generation students — young people whose parents never attended college or university. Riddell hopes that stakeholders and decision-makers live the conference with concrete ideas and models for success from across the world.
Thirty-four academic papers are being presented based on four key themes – increasing the odds of post-secondary access and success, the power of partnerships between institutions and the private sector, the role of career development in building pathways to and from post-secondary education, and system-level initiatives to increase access and success.
The conference schedule has been organized with lengthy periods of unorganized time for networking and the exchange of ideas. The conference ends Tuesday.
An invitation-only policy session will occur Wednesday with major government bureaucrats, stakeholders and over twenty institution presidents gathering to discuss policy.
Check back here Wednesday for further coverage.
CASA responses to CFS quotes in article about end of CMSF
The Concordian ran an article about the end of the CMSF foundation Tuesday which focused on the reality that Quebec students will likely be excluded from the new grant program due to Ottawa’s love of appeasing side-deals for Quebec. (The Quebec government will get the money that would go directly to students instead. What happen’s [...]
The Concordian ran an article about the end of the CMSF foundation Tuesday which focused on the reality that Quebec students will likely be excluded from the new grant program due to Ottawa’s love of appeasing side-deals for Quebec.
(The Quebec government will get the money that would go directly to students instead. What happen’s then is anyone’s guess.)
included quotes from the CFS which CASA does not believe to be wholly accurate.
Zach Churchill, National Director of CASA responded to the quotes and article by submitting a comment to the newspaper which is now on the paper’s website.
Budget 2008: Good works
Maclean’s columnist Paul Wells on changes to student aid in Canada
From Alex Usher at the indispensable Educational Policy Institute, a grown-up assessment of the student-aid provisions in yesterday’s federal budget. Alex demonstrates real design flaws that should be fixed before the Canada Student Grants are implemented. But a few things are clearer today than they were last night.
• Jean Chrétien’s Year 2000 bauble, the Canada Millennium Scholarships — designed to last a decade and scheduled to run out next year — will not leave a vacuum behind when they disappear. Despite major design flaws, the Millennium Scholarships were appreciated by student groups who worried mightily about their disappearance. (OK, try not to notice that only 621 people signed the CASA petition. Work with me here a bit.) And in retrospect, as millennium projects go — remember when everyone thought they needed a millennium project? Strange days — a massive investment in human capital did make a lot more sense than, say, a dome.
• Unlike the Chrétien-Martin formula of a one-time allocation to a “foundation” that is designed to be spent down to zero — and to produce a funding crisis in its last year — the Canada Student Grants are part of regular annual program spending. This means they are permanent, at least insofar as, like any other program, the only way to get rid of them is to shut down the budget line, which will get noticed if it ever happens. And the total amount in the grant program is budgeted, in the first few years, to increase every year, not to hold at a steady-state of about $350 million.
• The new grants reach massively more students than the Millennium Scholarships did, though they do it by giving each recipient less money. Whether you like that will depend on whether you would have qualified for one of the old awards. But the new grants also distribute the money in a different, smarter way: the CSG bursaries will be paid up-front, to keep students from incurring debt at the outset. Millennium scholarship money was typically paid after a student completed her studies, to help pay down debt that had already been incurred.
• The Millennium Scholarships suffered from more than a year of confusion at the outset because nobody could decide whether they were need- or merit-based. Chrétien wanted a substantial merit component. That eventually got sorted out, but the Tories avoid this confusion by launching two discrete programs: the CSG (income-based, which as Usher points out is different from need-based and, if your income is low, better) and the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarships (scroll down, it’s in here somewhere). At first glance, these looked trivial to me — only 500 a year. But on a population basis, that makes the program comparable in size to the U.S. Fulbright program, and way bigger than the Trudeau Scholars program, which funds about 15 recipients per year. And those comparisons seem apt: the “merit” being rewarded here appears to be top-in-the-world merit, not garden-variety, you-win-if-you-get-an-A merit. Because the Vanier scholarships are international — foreigners can win them to study in Canada, Canadians can win them to help study abroad — they can, over time, constitute a powerful signal that Canadian universities aspire not only to house large student cohorts but, here and there at least, to encourage and welcome genius.
ON-THE-OTHER-HAND UPDATE: It looks like all the new money for the research granting councils is targeted toward specific fields of research. This is silly, and reflects the Harper government’s deep-seated conviction that surprise and individual initiative — whether it comes from the Tory back bench, the press gallery, or a laboratory somewhere — are bad news.
STRATEGY UPDATE: Still, wounded Liberals who don’t like being called chicken may ask, if on balance the budget does good things then why should the Liberals bring the government down?
Short answer: Because since when do Liberals want to be in the business of letting Conservative governments introduce useful budgets? If the opposition were working in its own interests, instead of second-guessing itself into a tailspin, it would already have defeated the Harper government before budget day.
BUDGET 2008: That’s it?
Budget 2008 offers no big moves in higher education
The 2008 federal budget had been widely expected to contain several major initiatives in higher education, but what the Conservative government delivered on Tuesday was instead a modest tinkering with the status quo, with some additional money for research, and housekeeping changes at two major student aid programs.
Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said in the budget speech, “We must ensure that the next generation of Canadians has the opportunity to excel in this increasingly competitive world.”
Post-secondary initiatives announced in the budget will see the Canadian Millennium Scholarship Foundation replaced with a similar program; administrative changes to student loans; new scholarships for graduate students; money to help secure university laboratories and new funding for medical, automotive, and environmental research.
COMPLETE BUDGET 2008 EDUCATION COVERAGE
COMMENT Is giving less money to more students really victory?
COMMENT Good works (Paul Wells)
COMMENT Student loan borrowers keep propping up system (Julian Benedict)
NEWS Millennium Scholarship Foundation to be replaced
NEWS No interest rate cut for student loans
NEWS New funds for university research
NEWS New grad scholarships aim to attract international talent
The Canadian Millennium Scholarship Foundation, which provides $350 million a year in needs and merit based scholarships, is to be replaced in 2009 by a new, $350 million Canada Student Grants Program. Students will see little difference between the two programs. Grants will be given out based on an income assessment. Low-income students will get $2,000 a year and students from middle-income families will receive $800 for each year of study, guaranteed during the entire course of their university or college degree. Under the current Millennium program, students must reapply each year for needs-based grants. The Millennium Foundation’s merit-based scholarships are also to be phased out.
Canada Student Grants funding is budgeted to increase by $80 million by 2012-13, to $430 million.
“This government is good at spreading chunks of money here and chunks of money there with little actual new money involved,” said Liberal post-secondary critic Mike Savage. “There is no talk of expanding the student loans system to assist more students, there is no increase the amount of aid that a student can receive.”
After a year-long review of Canada Student Loans, the government is also changing the way student loans are administered. The budget allocates $23 million over four years to create a new service delivery model. The federal government also says it will work with the provinces to create a one-stop, national website to administer student loans.
An additional $26 million over four years will be used to increase loans to part-time and married students. The budget also says that the government plans to spend $76 million over four years to assist graduates experiencing difficulty repaying their student loans. However, the government did not provide any details on exactly how this money will be used, saying it still has to negotiate agreements with the provinces.
Student groups had called for lower student loan interest rates. The 2008 budget left the federal student loan interest rate unchanged.
Universities will receive $116 million in new research funding next year. The new funding is directed primarily at research with environmental or commercial applications. $80 million will go to Canada’s three major research granting councils. Genome Canada, a not-for-profit corporation that funds genomics and proteomics research will receive an additional $140 million. And $250 million will be spent over the next five years on a new Automotive Innovation Fund, which will sponsor research in the automotive sector.
Five hundred top graduate students will receive support from a new program, the Canada Graduate Scholarships. To encourage top graduate students to stay in Canada, the government will spend $25 million over the next two years to create the scholarship which will be worth up to $50,000 over three years.
To encourage parents to save for a child’s education through a Registered Education Savings plans, the amount of time that a plan may stay open has been extended from 25 to 35 years, and the maximum contribution period has been extended by 10 years.
