All Posts Tagged With: "enrollment"
A little Bird told me…
Need some help finding a great (and easy) elective?
Trying to decide which electives to take to balance your course load for next term? Can’t choose between that psychology or philosophy course?
Just check out Birdcourses.com. It’s a website where Canadian university students can vote on their courses’ “birdiness.” Or in other words, how Mickey Mouse a course is.
My undergrad enrollment appointment is this week. Meaning, I need to know exactly what electives I want for next semester. Thanks to one of the best websites ever, I was able look for the perfect electives that could complement my course load.
Yes, courses that sound easy and almost guarantee a good mark.
All of the most important intel about a course is listed on a single page. This includes which professors you should try to get, and whether tests and finals (if the course even has them) are essay-based or multiple choice.
Plus, there’s a section for comments where other students can share their impressions of the course.
Of course, some students want to take courses that also broaden their perspectives, enriching their lives with new ways of thinking, helping them discover a more profound sense of Self. Or something like that.
Just as long at the course has a perfect 5 on the birdiness scale.
Sometimes you’ll see a course with a mixed rating. Like Molecular Biology at Waterloo. Whoever posted this course thought they should spread the joy known as Molecular Biology, by claiming “This course is easy-fasheezy. You learn about cells and how they affect you and why you should care. Word! This course was so fun.”
I was thrilled when I read that. It’s a course I need to take in third year. Now instead of dreading it, I could actually look forward to it.
But then I read some of the comments posted from other students who had already lived through the course.
“No…this course is by far one of the hardest bio’s i’ve taken and is known to be a really hard biology…if ur looking for an easy bio try 439.”
And, “Without a doubt, the hardest bio course, and aside from org. chem, the hardest course ive taken yet! i took it DE…biggest mistake! assignments and quizzes are easy enough to make you think you can do ok…the final is BRUTAL!”
This is one of the small dangers of the site. Although most students simply want to share the triumph/euphoria of having found the perfect bobo class, there’s always someone with a sick sense of humour.
Turns out that Molecular Biology course might not be so birdy after all.
“I don’t know who put this course on this site. But it definitely licks balls.”
- Photo courtesy of klynslis
The Interview: David Foot
One of Canada’s leading economists says universities should prepare for declining enrolment, not growth
Earlier this week I spoke with David Foot, University of Toronto economics professor who is best known as the author of Boom, Bust & Echo: How to Profit from the Coming Demographic Shift., one of the best-selling and most influential Canadian books of the past decade. You can listen to our conversation here. (Note that I had some technical difficulties, as they say — my device that records directly from a telephone headset was buggy, so I had to record from speaker phone. So the audio is a bit rough at the start. But sit tight: sometime before 1:00, it improves.)
So what did Foot have to say about how demographic changes are going to impact higher education?
“Right at the moment colleges and universities across Canada are stretched to their gills, as it were, for space,” says Foot. The number of “Echo” generation births, according to Foot, peaked in 1991, and the last of that group is now in the higher education system or soon will be. But after 1991 birth rates began to decline. That means we’re about to enter a period where Canada’s university-age population will be falling, not rising.
“We know that there’s a smaller cohort of 17 year olds and 18 years olds [coming], and so we know that university and post secondary enrolments will gradually decline in the first decade of the new millennium.”
Some areas, such as the Atlantic provinces, are already experiencing a declining population of university-age people. However, a number of university administrators have predicted rising enrolments. Two years ago, the presidents of the Greater Toronto Area universities said that there was an urgent need for new funding and possibly even the construction of a new university in the region, to cope with what they expect will be a boom in university enrolment in the GTA, due to a growing GTA population combined with rising university participation rates. (See our stories on the subject here and here.) The participation rate measures the percentage of young people choosing to pursue higher education. If participation rates increase, meaning that a higher percentage of young people choose to go to university, enrolment could continue to increase even in the face of a declining population of young people.
Foot, however, says he’s “putting a caution” on the GTA presidents’ assumptions. “They’re not aware of the demographics as well as they might be.”
He questions in particular the assumption that participation rates will rise — and he argues that if we get into a situation where universities in the GTA are crowded while campuses in the rest of Ontario and Canada are thinning out, we should look to make better use of those underused universities. Will it make sense, asks Foot, “to build more buildings in the GTA when there are buildings in Sudbury and Windsor and Peterborough that are not being fully utilized?”
“It’s a little bit of I’m going to look after myself jack and to hell with everybody else, and that’s not necessarily good public policy from the government’s point of view. I think some exchange programs with some of these other universities that are likely to have declining enrolments would be a much better public policy perspective.”
University participation rates have increased sharply over the past generation, and many assume the trend will continue. Foot says it’s unlikely. “Past trends embody the incredible increase in the participation of women in post secondary education, and as we know there are now more women than men in those age groups in our post secondary system.” Those looking for participation rates to increase can point to the opportunity to fully engage populations currently underrepresented in higher education, such as the disabled or native Canadians. However, says Foot, “the important point here is that women are half the population. So if you get a rise in participation rates in half the population, you’re going to see an impact on enrolments. But if you’re looking at the disabled or native peoples as the next group to raise the participation rates, disabled peoples are less than 1 per cent, the native population is less than 4 per cent. You’re not going to get the same sort of impact of the increase in participation from much smaller groups.”
Listen to the audio of the full interview here.
Ontario enrolment crunch needs back-to-basics university
Report suggests undergrad-only and low-research university, “open” online school
To absorb an anticipated 25,000 new university students over the next 15 years, Ontario should considering creating new types of post-secondary institutions, including an undergraduates-only, low-research university and an “open” online university, according to the province’s advisory council on higher education.
In its Feb. 13 report, titled Degrees of Opportunity: Broadening Student Access by Increasing Institutional Differentiation in Ontario Higher Education, the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario looks at the province’s various options for dealing with a massive influx of university students in the province.
The study concludes that the province’s higher education system could benefit from an “open university” that would allow students to combine credits from various institutions, as well as encouraging universities to open “satellite” campuses in the Greater Toronto Area.
The report, prepared by Glen Jones and Michael Skolnik, two professors at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, also recommends the province consider starting a new Toronto-based undergraduate university that would focus on arts and science, and suggests that community colleges be allowed to offer a larger range of degrees.
According to the authors, growing interest in post-secondary education, paired with an increase in new Canadians, has fuelled demand for more spots in universities and colleges in the province.
However, the report says Queen’s Park should avoid starting any full-service universities, designing a new breed of “polytechnic” institutions for higher-level technical learning, or letting community colleges offer the first two years of four-year university programs, which is common in Western Canada and the United States.
Zigzag routes of Atlantic post-secondary students
Report finds many “dropouts” either transfer or suspend their studies
Statistics Canada has released a new study of post-secondary student persistence in the Atlantic provinces. The report was prepared by Ross Finnie and Theresa Qiu who authored a similar national study last year titled The Patterns of Persistence in Post-Secondary Education in Canada.
As with the earlier study, the new report shows that many of the students who leave post-secondary institutions before graduating actually switch to another institution or temporarily suspended their post-secondary education before enrolling again (often referred to as stop-outs). The report demonstrates that community college and university dropout rates tend to be overstated because students who switch institutions or leave briefly and return are often not taken into account.
The study found that the rate of leaving was higher for college students than for university students in Atlantic Canada. Among students aged 17 to 20 when they started university, men were more likely to leave their studies than women – 28% of men left compared to 22% of women. Amongst college students, the rates were almost identical for men and women (33% and 34% respectively).
The study found that 33% of students aged 17 to 20 who enrolled in a university in the fall of 2002 or 2003 had left their studies within two years, however, about 25% of these students switched to another institution. About 25% of the remaining university early leavers subsequently resumed their studies. For college students, the two-year dropout rate was about 35% over the same time period. The number of switchers amongst college students was much lower as compared to university students.
After accounting for switchers and stop-outs, the two-year dropout rate for Atlantic universities fell from 33% to 18% while the rate for colleges dropped from 35% to 29%.
The full report can be downloaded here in .pdf format.
