All Posts Tagged With: "enrolment"

AUCC report says Canada runs the risk of shortage in knowledge workers

If university enrolment does not increase by 1.3 per cent a year, Canada will see a labour shortage in “knowledge-intensive occupations,” according to a new report by the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada. In a statement released along with their Enrolment Trends 2011 study, the university advocacy group claims “there could be jobs available without qualified workers to fill them” if provincial governments reduce spending on post-secondary education in reaction to slow economic growth. The federal government estimates that 1.4 million jobs will be created in the decade between 2008 and 2017, the bulk of which will require a university degree. The government also estimates that 4.1 million jobs will become available due to retiring baby boomers.

Applications rise 46% in a decade

With an expected 50,000 boost to enrolment over the next five years, Ontario universities are worried about how they are going to pay for it all. According to recent numbers out of the Council of Ontario Universities, university applications in the province have jumped 2.7 per cent since last year, and 46 per cent over the past decade.

The figures suggest the government is well on its way to meeting the goal of having 70 per cent of Ontarians earn a post-secondary credential. But universities are warning that without extra funding, education quality could be negatively impacted. In an interview with Canadian University Press, McMaster University president Patrick Deane asked, “It’s good for Ontario that we have a higher level of participation, but is it good for Ontario that what the students are actually getting when they enrol in university is not as good as it might be?”

A similar sentiment was made by COU president, Bonnie Patterson who says an “infusion of capital” is necessary if universities are going to meet the goals set by the government.

Student groups concerned about high tuition

Rising enrolment rates at Canadian universities were hailed Thursday as a future boon to the Canadian economy, but student advocates warned skyrocketing tuition is putting post-secondary education out of reach for many students.

Overall university enrolment increased 3.7 per cent over last year and 57 per cent from 1995, the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada reported. There were 898,000 full-time university students registered this fall. That’s good news for the economy, because university graduates represent about a quarter of the working population but are about 40 per cent of the tax base, said association president Paul Davidson.

“To be able to afford the quality of life, the standard of living, the quality of public services that we have in Canada, requires these kind of high-quality jobs that university graduates are getting,” Davidson said.

The rise in undergraduate students ranged from 0.7 per cent in Newfoundland and Labrador to 4.5 per cent in British Columbia. The hike in graduate students varied from 1.0 per cent in Manitoba to 17.6 per cent in Prince Edward Island, the report found.

University graduates increase Canada’s productivity and innovation, said Davidson. They also make more money. “Over a lifetime you can expect to earn $1.5 million more if you have a university degree than if you just finished high school,” he said.

They’re also more likely to get jobs in an economy that’s transitioning from being resource based to knowledge based. Over the last 20 years, about 87 per cent of the new professional and management positions created were filled by university graduates while jobs for high school graduates disappeared, the report said.

University graduates also emerged from the recent recession in a better position. From September 2008 until September 2010, there were 280,000 net new jobs for university graduates while almost the same number of jobs — 260,000 — for workers without a degree evaporated.

The enrolment figures were discussed as Davidson and 40 university presidents met Thursday with almost 20 MPs, cabinet ministers and other senior officials on Parliament Hill as part of their annual conference.

Davidson gave the government high marks for the “biggest single capital investment in a generation” in post-secondary infrastructure through the federal stimulus program. His association will seek continued government investment for research as it submits its pre-budget wish list to the Commons Finance Committee next week.

His call for more funding was echoed by The Canadian Federation of Students. Seven in 10 new jobs require a post-secondary education but for some students that’s tough to afford, said the chairwoman of the federation’s Ontario division.

Annual tuition fees vary widely, from about $2,500 in Newfoundland and Labrador to Ontario, where they’re highest at an average of $6,300, said Sandy Hudson. The cost forces some students to drop out. Others are left with staggering debt. “I’m $35,000 in debt and I just finished my post-secondary education, my undergraduate degree, in June,” said Hudson.

Hudson said she’d need to go to graduate school to make use of her sociology and political science degree, but might not be able to afford that. More than 39,000 people have signed the federation’s petition calling on the federal government to create a national post-secondary education act and restore funding for post-secondary education to 1992 levels.

The Canadian Press

2009 figures show enrolment continues to increase

The medical schools listed below are sorted by size of enrolment: from the largest, Université de Montréal, to the smallest—and newest—Northern Ontario School of Medicine. These 2009 figures show enrolment continues to increase (up 15 per cent compared to 2006), with women outnumbering men at most institutions.

*Northern Ontario School of Medicine is located at Lakehead and Laurentian universities.

Source: Office of Research and Information Services, Association of Faculties of Medicine of Canada

Waiting for acceptance is excruciating

High school seniors across Canada are on tenterhooks these days as they await news of their acceptance from the country’s universities or colleges.

Their parents are likely just as anxious, having heard the oft-repeated lament: “Will I get in?” Vida Korhani, 17, of Toronto, says waiting to hear from the three Ontario institutions she applied to–the University of Toronto, Ryerson and York University–has been absolutely excruciating. “It was horrible. Many of my friends had heard back from U of T and I just felt like my average maybe wasn’t good enough.”

Her average is 92 per cent.

While the student at the Hawthorn School for Girls found out she was in fact accepted at both Toronto and York, she’s still waiting to hear if she’ll make it into her first choice, Ryerson’s well-regarded journalism program.

“Mind-boggling” is how her Grade 12 classmate Abiola Abraham describes the wait to hear from her first choice, the University of Waterloo, for computer science and business administration. “So anxious, every day I was just checking my email all the time,” the 16-year-old says. Being accepted at University of Toronto and McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont., has relieved some of the pressure, she says.

Laura Schoof, 17, of Vincent Massey Secondary School in Windsor, Ont., says it was stressful waiting to be accepted. “I pretty much went home and checked the Internet every day just to see and we woke up and checked the mailbox as soon as I got up,” she says. She was accepted at three colleges but chose the pre-health program at Fanshawe College in London, Ont., because it is close to home and will help her get into medical radiation technology later.

As if the students aren’t nervous enough, the “cut-off marks” referring to the lowest mark a university will accept from an incoming student can be a moving target. Montreal’s McGill University, for example, has been gradually lowering its cut-off marks every two weeks this spring. No one knows where it will end.

Seneca College, like many other institutions, monitors its “application targets” daily, says Cindy Hazell, vice-president at the Toronto college.

Offers are sent out over several months, although the two major waves are in February and April.

The cut-off marks are not necessarily determined by ability to pass the program but are set according to the number of physical spaces, specialized equipment such as labs and number of faculty available, says Hazell. Much of that is determined by the amount of government funding supplied to each post-secondary institution, she adds.

But even when students are accepted, the nerve-racking part is not always over. More than one offer means they’ll have to choose.

That’s where guidance counsellors come in. Fern Schessel of the Toronto French School has been a guidance counsellor for 41 years and works with students applying all across Canada and abroad. Schessel says students fortunate enough to have more than one choice should ask themselves several questions. Which school has the program they want? Where can they flourish? Where would they feel most at home? What resources are available to them at various institutions?

Finally, she tells them to listen to their gut. It’s important that they do their research, she says. Her advice: visit the schools, look at their programs, check out the city they would live in. “A lot of our kids will go based on ‘my friends are going to McGill’ or  . . .  ‘it’s perceived as prestigious for me to go from here to McGill’ and so McGill is automatically a university of choice.”

“They may not have opened the calendar to see what programs are available, they may not have walked the campus, but they will go,” she says.

Mohamud Bulle, 17, another Vincent Massey student from Windsor, has been accepted at two universities but hasn’t heard back from his first choice, the University of Western Ontario in London. He favours Western because it would allow him to study law in his second year, if he has the marks.

But that’s not the only reason. “Western’s a lot of fun, I’m not going to lie,” he laughs. “Some of my older friends have gone there and they say it’s a lot of fun.” He hesitates, then adds “as long as you balance.”

The Canadian Press

Colleges CEO says about 90 per cent of grads find work within six months

For the third year in a row, enrolment at Ontario’s 24 community colleges has seen an increase in first-year full-time students.

Colleges Ontario says enrolment rose seven per cent this year, with more than 113,000 students in first-year full-time programs. This increase follows growth of 5.6 per cent last year and a six per cent increase in 2007.

The province’s 24 colleges have a combined enrolment of more than 200,000 full-time and 350,000 part-time students.

Colleges Ontario CEO Linda Franklin says about 90 per cent of college grads find work within six months and 93 per cent of employers are satisfied or very satisfied with the ones they hire.

She says there is also a growing demand for college grads despite the economic downturn and predicts the demand will intensify in the years ahead.

- The Canadian Press

Colleges lure city-dwellers north for their post-secondary degrees

While young people from remote areas typically gravitate toward bright city lights for their post-secondary education, their big-city Ontario counterparts might want to consider precisely the opposite: a trip to the land of the aurora borealis.

Schools in northern Ontario have more space for students than they can fill, even as urban colleges and universities face higher demand than they can meet. Administrators say they’re trying out new recruitment strategies in an effort to fill the gap.

Rather than build costly new schools on premium city land, the reasoning goes, why not offer incentives to lure city-dwellers north for their post-secondary degrees?

In a recession, employment levels and demand for college programs run in a counter-cyclical manner, said Fred Gibbons of Northern College, an applied-arts and technology school with four campuses spread across northeastern Ontario.

That’s partly why Northern has seen a “phenomenal” 32 per cent increase in enrolment over the last two years, Gibbons said.

As of July 31, all six northern colleges had seen applications increase by about 4.2 per cent, said Colleges Ontario spokesman Rob Savage. Still, many remote colleges and universities sit partially empty despite the increase in demand.

Immigration and the recession have fuelled a spike in applications to southern Ontario schools, too, where space is less plentiful. Provincewide, the average increase in application numbers at colleges is 10 per cent, Savage said.

“It would make sense, rather than new bricks and mortar, to utilize excess capacity in the system now,” Gibbons said. “There is simply more space available in classrooms than we can fill on our own at the present time.”

Northern College’s four campuses could accommodate as many as 700 more students, Gibbons estimated.

Last year, 200 students studied at the school’s campus in Kirkland Lake, Ont., though there’s room for 700. The other three campuses, in the northern Ontario towns of Moosonee, Haileybury and Porcupine, are also running well below capacity.

But for first time since 2005, number of applications go down

According to the Ontario Universities’ Application Centre, the number of undergraduate applicants in the province has increased,  although the total number of applications received has gone down.

This decline in applications is due to a drop in the number of schools to which the students are applying. Although the number of first, second, and third-choice applications are up, the “safety” applications to fourth- or fifth-choice schools, for example, are down by 3.3 percent.

The price tag of university applications could be the reason behind this slight droop. That’s because the OUAC allows all applicants to pick their top three choices for a base price of $105, but must pay an extra $35 for each additional school.

For more on this topic, check out Tony Keller’s interview with one of Canada’s leading economists, David Foot on why he thinks fewer students will be heading to university.

Correction: this is an updated and corrected version of a story that appeared on this site.

Grad studies are on the rise, but the payoff in cash is small

More Canadians are pursuing graduate studies than ever before. Even prior to the recession—university enrolments tend to spike during economic downturns—a significant shift was already under way: according to Statistics Canada, 32 per cent more people had master’s degrees in 2006 than in 2001, and 30 per cent more had doctorates. But, as a recent study by the C.D. Howe Institute shows, going to grad school doesn’t always pay.

While the desire to pad the mind, rather than the wallet, is what motivates many of those who get advanced degrees, it may still come as a surprise that a simple bachelor’s is a far more fruitful economic investment. According to “Extra Earning Power: The Financial Returns to University Education in Canada,” throughout their careers, men can expect an average annual return (after taxes) of 12 per cent on what they paid for tuition, books and living expenses in undergrad; for women, who have less lucrative opportunities with just a high school diploma, it’s 14 per cent. For master’s degrees, meanwhile, the annual rate of return drops to 2.9 per cent for men, and five per cent for women. The payback is smaller still for Ph.D.s: women can anticipate a 3.6 per cent return, while men actually emerge in the red.

As author François Vaillancourt explains, though grad school often unlocks added earning potential, due to “very high” costs of tuition, living expenses and income lost, master’s degrees and Ph.D.s don’t necessarily translate into bigger bank accounts. For society, the costs are even more significant. When men get master’s degrees, government, taxpayers and universities actually take a financial hit. But despite negligible and, in some cases, negative value to society, Vaillancourt points out that there’s more to determining worth than dollars and cents. “One thing we cannot measure is the content of work,” he says. However, in the case of degrees for which taxpayers, in the big scheme of things, seem to be carrying the load, he suggests, “Perhaps society should ask itself, ‘Why?’ ”

Nearly 150 high school and elementary schools are on the chopping block

More than 150,000 students across the province may see the doors of their schools close forever in the coming years, according to a new report by People for Education.

As a result of low enrolment, 146 Ontario schools may be slated to close over the next two years. The impact on smaller communities could be potentially devastating, says the group’s executive director.

“It can become an accelerating issue, where a small town loses people and services and if it loses its schools, fewer families want to move there,” said Annie Kidder.

“Do we say to a small town, ‘No, sorry, it’s just too expensive?”‘

The report shows that more than 100 schools are on the chopping block for closure as a result of dwindling enrolment numbers in both high schools and elementary schools.

Since the 1997-98 school year, there has been a 15 per cent decline in enrolment for Ontario elementary schools and since 2002, average enrolment in secondary schools has dropped by 14 per cent.

While 16 schools held their last day of classes in 2008, another 34 schools are set to close in 2009.

Kidder said closures are a contentious issue because boards and schools receive much of their funding based on their number of students – meaning smaller schools are left with fewer programs, and boards are faced with some tough choices.

“We think these are pretty startling numbers and we want to draw attention to it as a provincial issue,” Kidder said.

The report also sheds a light on the growing problems in northern Ontario schools, with one principal complaining of working with a “half science lab,” because there’s not enough cash to go around.

The effects of school closure also impacts poorer areas.

Joanne MacEwan, chair of the Ottawa Catholic School Parents’ Association says a high-needs, high-poverty area in the eastern part of the city recently saw its middle school close.