All Posts Tagged With: "enrolment"

PEI has largest full-time enrolment growth, New Brunswick has largest decline

Statistics Canada has released its 2006/07 university enrolment counts. The total enrolment at universities across Canada was 1,057,300 in 2006/07, up 0.9% from 1,047,705 in the previous year.

Full-time registrations declined in New Brunswick (-4.8%), Newfoundland and Labrador (-3.0%), British Columbia (-2.4%), Nova Scotia (-2.1%), and Alberta (-0.7%). The number of full-time registrations rose in four provinces: Prince Edward Island (+3.3%), Ontario (+2.7%), Manitoba (+1.2%), and Quebec (+0.8%). The trend for Saskatchewan is not provided because data from the University of Regina was unavailable.

The figures below plot university enrolment levels (full-time, part-time, and totals) in Canada and Newfoundland and Labrador over a 15-year period starting from 1992/93.

University of the People would have study communities, homework and exams

From The New York Times:

An Israeli entrepreneur with decades of experience in international education plans to start the first global, tuition-free Internet university, a nonprofit venture he has named the University of the People.

The University of the People, like other Internet-based universities, would have online study communities, weekly discussion topics, homework assignments and exams. But in lieu of tuition, students would pay only nominal fees for enrollment ($15 to $50) and exams ($10 to $100), with students from poorer countries paying the lower fees and those from richer countries paying the higher ones.

Experts in online education say the idea raises many questions.

Priorities include increasing enrolment and number of skilled trades workers

The Council of Atlantic Ministers of Education and Training are making plans for collaboration:

The Atlantic ministers of education and training emerged from meetings in Halifax this week with a commitment to improve literacy rates in Atlantic Canada. Ministers will soon submit a literacy action plan to the Council of Atlantic Premiers that will focus on teacher training, sharing best practices, increasing collaboration among teachers from the Atlantic region, and promoting adult and workplace literacy.

The literacy action plan will form an integral part of the 2009-2012 Strategic Direction which was released by the ministers this week. The strategic direction document outlines steps that departments of education and training will undertake in public and post-secondary education over the next three years.

Public education priorities include school readiness, educational leadership, instructional practices for all students, and numeracy skills, while post-secondary education and training priorities relate to increasing enrolment numbers in post-secondary education institutions, promoting quality assurance of post-secondary education, and increasing the number of skilled trades workers.

Here are the ‘Strategic Areas’ that fall under post-secondary education and training:

Enrolment in Post-Secondary Institutions: Low fertility rates and high out-migration numbers suggest that post-secondary institutions in Atlantic Canada will continue to experience student enrolment issues in the years to come. Data released recently from Statistics Canada shows that three of the four Atlantic provinces have fertility rates below the national average and all have proportionally more senior citizens than the rest of Canada. Statistics Canada records also indicate that, for the period 1994-2004, the population group between the ages of 20 and 34 decreased by approximately 60,000 in the Atlantic region.

Atlantic provinces, individually and collectively, have introduced a number of initiatives to increase the population. These activities have also focused on the attraction and retention of immigrants and of international students. In the area of post-secondary education, some provinces have taken measures to increase the availability of university and community college programs.

Goal: To increase enrolment numbers in Atlantic Canadian post-secondary institutions.

Quality Assurance: Atlantic provinces have structures in place to conduct quality assurance for public post-secondary programs. These systems are in place at both the university and community college sectors. For private trainers, the rules vary from province to province, which lead to inconsistencies.

Goal: To develop a list of quality indicators that will have a base in solid research planning.

Skilled Trades: Some of the provinces in Atlantic Canada have started to reintroduce skilled trades in their public education system. With this change, there will be new opportunities for colleges to partner with the public schools, which may lead to increased enrolment.

Goal: To improve the educational linkages for the apprenticeship program to ensure appropriate level of connections between post-secondary and K-12 systems.

Adult Literacy: Approximately half of adults living in the Atlantic region have below level 3 literacy and/or numeracy skills. This affects their ability to find and improve their employment situation and can add additional strain on their family lives. From this aspect, educators look to improve adult literacy rates from both an employer and community perspective.

Goals: 1. Increasing Awareness –to raise social awareness of the benefits of improving literacy and essential skills and to engage employers and industry groups in program ownership. 2. Learner Recruitment and Retention –to eliminate barriers to learning opportunities and assure relevance and value to the learner.

Only about 10% of students leave PSE without credential

I rounded off my recent trip to Western Europe by attending the International Conference on Education, Economy and Society in Paris last week. In addition to giving a presentation with a colleague, I had an excellent opportunity to discuss post-secondary participation and access research with Dr. Ross Finnie of the University of Ottawa and Statistics Canada’s Marc Frenette.

Finnie and Frenette presented on three different papers that are emerging from their somewhat similar research programs. Finnie gave a very interesting overview of a project that tracked the enrolment patterns of post-secondary students over a five-year period. The report of Finnie’s study, co-authored with Theresa Qiu of Statistics Canada, was actually leaked to The Globe and Mail earlier this month. (Access to the story is now, oddly, blocked by a padlock).

This piece of research is especially important because many previous Canadian studies of early student withdrawal, including one of my own, have reported rates of student attrition of 30 to 50 percent. Many of these student persistence studies have been limited by their inability to track students’ progression through multiple years, programs and/or institutions.

After accounting for students who stop-out and switch programs, Finnie shows that only about 10 percent of students leave the post-secondary system without a credential, which is far lower than one might anticipate from the results of earlier works.

What is going to happen to all these men, without post-secondary educations, in the oil and gas, mining, and construction industries when the boom slows down?

Paris Meilleur, executive director of the Alliance of Nova Scotia Student Associations, posted a spirited response to my recent article “The New Minority: Why some universities are talking about affirmative action — for men” on her blog. She is (justifiably in my opinion) irked at the phrase “the new, disadvantaged minority” in relation to men at university.

It’s common knowledge among university types that women are the majority on university campuses (60:40 nationally). But what there is much disagreement about is whether that is a problem. My article discusses how some schools in the U.S. apparently believe that men are “disadvantaged” enough to justify affirmative action policies. But the question remains: just what barriers are preventing men from going to university? Do these barriers constitute some kind of discrimination against men? And (shh… I know I’m not supposed to ask this) does it really matter if there are more women than men on campus?

I suggest in my article that as long as men are still making more money in the work force, it makes sense that women are choosing to go to university in droves. They need that competitive edge.

On the other hand, there are a number of reasons why we should be concerned about the “pink ghetto” on campus. Despite her outrage that we are even talking about affirmative action for men, Meilleur brings up an important point. What is going to happen to all these men in the oil and gas, mining, and construction industries, who have chosen not to pursue higher education, when the boom slows down? This is a particularly important question in these “interesting times” (ahem… the New Yorker taught me today that the first rule of a recession is not to talk about the recession).

Meilleur’ main point is that talking (and writing, I assume) about affirmative action programs is not useful. Rather, we should be talking about the other implications of this less than popular discussion. She writes: “Let’s talk about the broader social implications of a generation of young and middle-aged men leaving their communities and families to make money. … What the heck is happening in P-12 education? Let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about supporting boys in elementary and high school without making the girls feel guilty for their success.”

She’s right. In Canada, we’ve been slower than our southern neighbours in discussing the female university student phenomenon and we’ve resisted the temptation to make it into a crisis that it’s not. But it’s time to bring the dialogue to the next level, decide if and how the system is falling short for men, and propose some changes.

Last year, StatsCan put out its projections for enrolment at Canadian universities. The numbers were sobering: due to a demographic downturn expected to hit nationally in 2012 and that is already affecting some provinces, universities are soon going to have problems filling their seats. StatsCan put forward three possible scenarios for the future: participation rates stay the same and enrolment follows demographic trends (the gloomiest of the projections), participation rates continue to grow at a similar rate, and participation rates of men reach that of women (the most positive projection). I spoke to the StatsCan researcher who explained why they chose to include a projection dependant on upping the participation rate of men. He said that the male/female divide was becoming a common topic of discussion among university policy types and he thought the information would be helpful.

My source over at the Millennium Scholarship Foundation had an enlightening perspective on the possibility of focusing on men to alleviate the enrolment bust, as implied by Stats Can. He thought it wiser to target the groups that are truly disadvantaged and underrepresented at universities and hoped that men (especially men in those groups) would follow. These groups include Aboriginal Canadians, first generation students (young people whose parents did not attend university), and low-income students. Meilleur also mentions these themes.

The issue is a difficult and unpopular one. Gender issues in general are topics I tend to feel uncomfortable writing about. But although Meilleur seems equally uncomfortable labeling this topic as a “feminist” issue, she chooses to end her post with a quote about feminism anyways. And so will I.

“It’s important to remember that feminism is no longer a group of organizations or leaders. It’s the expectations that parents have for their daughters, and their sons, too. It’s the way we talk about and treat one another. It’s who makes the money and who makes the compromises and who makes the dinner. It’s a state of mind. It’s the way we live now.” ~Anna Quindlen