All Posts Tagged With: "scholarship"

STEM students will get $60,000 each

Seymour Schulich, who already has several Canadian schools named for him, has announced he has donated $100-million to fund scholarships in Canada and Israel, reports Shalom Life.

The Schulich Leader Scholarships are meant to increase enrollment in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) subjects, in order to spur innovation.

All graduating high school and CEGEP students in Canada and Israel who are planning to study STEM subjects may apply. Each winner will receive $60,000 over four years. Five Israeli and 20 Canadian Universities will award one scholar each in the first year of the program. After that it will grow 75 awards per year. United Jewish Appeal of Greater Toronto will administer the cash.

Schulich, a business leader, has already made donations that have resulted in the following things named for him: a medical and dentistry school at the University of Western Ontario, a library and a school of music at McGill University, a law school at Dalhousie University, an engineering school at the University of Calgary, an education school at Nipissing University and a business school at York University.

What’s David Marrello’s secret to success?

A Toronto high school student has earned a 100 per cent average in his high school courses, reports the Toronto Star.

David Marrello says his academic success is the result of constantly asking questions and being a perfectionist. He also makes time for extracurricular activities, including watching the famous quick show Jeopardy, playing the piano and heading up The Bishop Allen School’s Reach for the Top team.

Although he had his pick of schools, he chose to enroll close to home at York University’s Schulich School of Business. He will, of course, be attending for free thanks to a four-year scholarship.

Will help form the ‘front line of defense’

According to a news release from Florida State University, there is a “critical national shortage” of cybersecurity professionals, despite the fact that the internet is playing an increasingly important role in our everyday lives (the SFU news release mentions banking, power grid and stock exchange operations).

Apparently, the National Science Foundation (NSF) is trying to help fix the problem. They recently awarded a $1.85 million grant to FSU’s Department of Computer Science, providing scholarships for almost 60 FSU computer science graduates as part of a “Scholarship for Service” program.

Students who receive the scholarship will be required to work for the government for a minimum period of time, forming the “front line of defense in protecting the nation’s information infrastructure from cyberterrorism.”

-Photo courtesy of Don Hankins

How universities and high schools are setting students up for disappointment

Scott Penner was a model high school student. With a grade 12 average of 93 per cent, and with math and science as his strongest subjects, he was poised to be a successful engineering student. That is, until he started at the University of Manitoba. Penner was not expecting to glide through university, though he “was still expecting to do fairly well.” Even by these lowered standards, his first year was less than encouraging. Not only was he receiving an uncharacteristic assortment of Bs and Cs, he failed first-year calculus, a prerequisite to continue on in engineering. “It was a bit of a shock,” he says.

Penner is not alone. The vast majority of students see their grades fall, often dramatically, once they get to university. What is sometimes called “grade shock” can have devastating consequences for students, as they struggle to cope with the fact that they are no longer at the top of the class.

Within the course of a semester dreams can be easily whisked away. “The business program or engineering program that they thought they were going to pursue [is] not an option for them anymore,” says Brock University economist Felice Martinello who recently co-authored a study on the changes in grades between high school and first-year university.

There are also financial repercussions. In 2008, Maclean’s surveyed the rate at which students who received entrance scholarships kept the requisite grades to maintain their funding going into second year. At York University, where fully 60 per cent of incoming students received an entrance scholarship, only 10 per cent kept their funding. At McMaster the rate was 21 per cent. At Ryerson, seven per cent.

As grades have long been known to predict whether students will complete their program, significant grade drops may be contributing to dropout rates, suggesting that students coming in, even with an A+ average, may become discouraged and simply give up. In fact, the best evidence we have suggests that it is the highest achieving students that are most at risk for being disappointed in university.

In his paper, Martinello, and coauthor Ross Finnie, find–consistent with previous research–that on average students see a 10-point drop in their grades once they are in university. Using data from Statistics Canada’s Youth In Transition Survey, the study concludes that nearly half of all students surveyed saw their marks decline by one letter grade. About 23 per cent saw their grades plummet by two letters or more. Only 2.5 per cent of students saw their grades improve, and about a quarter maintained averages consistent with their high school marks.

But, what is novel about Finnie and Martinello’s paper, and pertinent for high school academic stars like Penner, is that the economists determined that “the highest achieving group (in high school) has the largest decrease in grades.” Students entering university with a 90 per cent or higher experienced a drop of 11.9 points. Students with high school marks in the 60-79 per cent range had only a 4.4-point drop. Prior studies tended to assume that even with a drop, that there was a linear relationship between high school and university grades. Finnie and Martinello’s research challenges that assumption.

“You’d think that maybe, oh, it’s the weaker students, that once they go to university, they’re really going to get killed, but it turns out that’s it’s the 90 plus group,” Martinello says.

Recent trends suggest that the challenges of grade shock are only going to become more widespread. That’s because students with average entering grades, in the B or B+ range, are slowly disappearing. And when all, or most, of the students come in with an A or A+ average, many will have nowhere to go but down.

At the University of British Columbia average entrance grades across the university are expected to be 87 per cent this year, a two per cent increase from last year, and up from 80 per cent ten years ago, and 70 per cent twenty years ago. Andrew Arida, UBC’s associate director of enrolment says higher entering grades are simply a matter of supply and demand. “Because students are presenting higher grades, we’ve had to raise our admission averages to avoid over-enrolling,” he explains.

Only a few years ago, UBC was admitting around 15 per cent of students with grades below 80. That number is dwindling fast. Although Arida didn’t have final figures for the fall, he says only a “small number” of students will get in with less than an A. Students entering the two largest faculties, science and arts, will need a minimum high school average of 86 and 85 per cent respectively.

Similarly, the University of Waterloo increased by seven per cent this year over last, the number of entering students with an average of at least 85 per cent.

Schools like Waterloo and UBC, already considered prestigious, are joining an elite club of universities that are inaccessible to all but the highest achieving students. With an average entering grade of 88.9 per cent, Queen’s University rarely admits students with less than an A average. At McGill, the median average entrance grade for Canadian students is 92 per cent.

Says request for scholarship for “non-aboriginals” violates university policy

The University of Saskatchewan turned down a donation of $500,000 because the donor wanted the funds used to support scholarships for “non-aboriginal” students, reports the National Post.

The university states a race-based scholarship would violate both university policies and human rights legislation.

I’ve always been bothered by race-based scholarships because they do not directly target the factors that disadvantage students.

Yes, students of aboriginal backgrounds are more likely to be social-economically disadvantaged. Yes, the history of how we treated (and continue to treat in some cases) aboriginals has resulted in a lot of the disadvantages that aboriginal students face.

That said, the problem is not their race and I’ve always seen scholarships that use race as a determining factor leaving the impression that race may be the problem.

Bursaries should be targeted to the actual disadvantages they are supposed to address. I find it perfectly acceptable to have bursaries designed to assist students moving from a rural reserve into a university town. There are plenty of bursaries that have geographic restrictions. Having funds with the criteria of being a descendant of someone who was put in residential schools is acceptable. The trauma of those schools continues to be passed down generation by generation. It is actually targeting a real problem. A scholarship based purely on need would be even better.

Unless race is the problem then why do we use it as a criteria to find a solution? Simple: because it makes things easy. Why go further than the skin layer of the problem?

(Hattip: Dale Kirby)

How I put myself through school by writing to two of the richest men in Canada

In September 2005, I left Toronto for grad school in Berkeley. In my bags, along with a copy of Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem and several pairs of regulation California flip-flops, I had two cheques totalling $26,000. The cheques were from Canadian millionaires I’d never met. They’d promised to send me money to pay for grad school, provided I write to them once a month. They also asked me to keep the arrangement confidential.

I kept half of my promise.

What follows is the story of how one girl (me) put herself through school by writing to two of the richest men in Canada.
April 2005. I was at my friend Rachel’s house, sitting at her kitchen table with Shuah, her lovely bespectacled friend. It was a spring day in Toronto.

I needed money. Not for an abortion or a car or anything ghastly like that. I’d just applied to one of America’s most expensive graduate schools and had gotten in. They were offering me $5,000 in scholarships, which would cover the cost of coffee and sunscreen for a few months. I needed more, and I needed it fast.

“Who has money?” I asked, into the air.

Rachel and Shuah looked at me. “Rich people have money,” Rachel said.

We didn’t have any money, that was for sure. Rachel was dating a soft-hearted grad student from a poor town in the Maritimes and Shuah was law-school-thousands-of-dollars-in-debt-poor. Me, I was still paying off student loans from my undergrad years at McGill.

My mother worked a government job at an arts agency, and though she would have given me her last cent even if it meant she’d have to live in a tent across the street, she couldn’t spare much. I needed $40,000 at least. My dad was a full-time writer. He’s also pretty successful, but he’d just gotten married and bought a house and I knew every cent was headed in that direction. I needed to widen my contacts. I needed rich people.

“Okay, so how do I get money from them,” I said.

We mulled it over.

“I suppose you could just ask them,” said Rachel.

A scheme started to take shape. I knew I could write a funny letter if I needed to. I also knew from reading magazine profiles of millionaires and from watching Annie that rich people were often eccentric. I did some creative visualization, Shakti Gawain style: I pictured a big man sitting in a chair, reading my letter, and reaching for his chequebook. I pictured him calling out to his secretary: “Put this in the mail, Gladys. This girl’s got spunk.”