All Posts Tagged With: "Universities"

Using a student vote to increase fees has more to do with politics than services

Student union elections have become a pretext for yearly ancillary fee increases by way of referendum. Whether proposed increases are sought by the administration, the student union executive, or some wayward student club, students can count on the fact that student referenda, and accompanying fee increases, have become a normal part of university governance.

While superficially epitomizing the idea of university democracy, the practice is a wanton exercise in the abrogation of responsibility. Referenda insulate those tasked with making decisions, or with representing students, from doing their job. Having a new ancillary fee, or an increase to an existing one, approved by students allows those who proposed it to deny culpability, or to justify their actions, by simply pointing to the referendum. No other argument is needed. When everyone is responsible, no one is.

Ancillary fees are typically attached to specific services unrelated to academics. Academics are, of course, supposed to be funded through a university’s regular operating budget and financed partially by regular tuition fees. Referenda, usually held during student elections, are used to propose funding for initiatives like a university athletics centre or a universal bus pass, as well as for more ridiculous ideas.

Further, as anyone who has campaigned in a referendum, or watched one closely, certainly knows, it doesn’t take much to get a fee passed. Twenty per cent turnout for student elections is considered quite high, meaning as long as core supporters get out to the polls many initiatives can easily pass, regardless of whether the fee is useful or not. Similarly the failure of an initiative also has little bearing on the practicality of the proposal.

If ancillary fees cannot be accommodated through traditional governance  practices, and thus easily revoked if proven ineffective, or otherwise useless, than they should be avoided. In the case of student unions, there should exist the flexibility to respond to student disapproval of an initiative attached to the new fee.

The notion that student approval equals legitimacy simply because students have been asked is patently false. The university population turns over every few years, and, so, the legitimacy of a student vote quickly vanishes.

Unfortunately, there is no easy fix to the scourge of using student referenda to advance pet projects, supplement university coffers, and to otherwise subvert the decision making process. The practice is abetted, depending on the province, by a sometimes complicated web of legislation, conventions, and regulations.

Since 1994, the Ontario government has required that before new ancillary fees—those fees applying to services other than academics—can be levied, students must be consulted. While student support can be technically demonstrated through the wishes of student union representatives, the convention has been established that all ancillary fees, including student union fees, be subject to a student vote.

In British Columbia, government legislation explicitly requires that student societies poll their members before imposing any new fees. No such stipulation is placed on the university administration.

In Manitoba, the process for raising ancillary fees  is legally left to an institution’s board of governors, but student votes are still used by both university administrations, and student unions, to raise fees, though the practice is not used as widely as in Ontario. Although student referenda in Manitoba are generally ad hoc, a peculiar practice has evolved over the past decade where regular tuition fees have been permitted to increase after a student plebiscite, despite the existence of a tuition freeze. In Ontario, using a referendum to increase regular tuition would not be permitted.

It is quite obvious why governments would support such a process. They can publicly proclaim that they believe student costs should be kept to a minimum, while permitting universities, and student unions to raise fees as they please.

If universities were private entities, they would have to conform to market realities and learn to keep costs low, while maintaining quality, lest they lose students to competitors. I’ll never understand why those who believe students should have greater control over their education, are also the same people who fly into hysterics whenever the words “private” and “university” are joined.

In any event, under our system of government-supported universities, student fees are treated like a tax, to be imposed in ways more related to the internal politics of the university than to the services actually provided.

Students tell what they really think about their university, from the quality of their profs to whether they feel they get the runaround.

Here you will find additional results from the Canadian University Survey Consortium (CUSC).  The CUSC survey, which was commissioned by the universities, asks more than 100 questions about specific aspects of the undergraduate experience—inside the classroom and beyond—designed to provide universities with data to help them assess programs and services.

Each year, the survey targets one of three student populations: first-year students, graduating students and all undergrads. In 2009, 34 campuses took part, administering an online questionnaire to a random sample of approximately 1,000 graduating students at each university. Institutions with fewer than 1,000 graduating students surveyed them all. In total, more than 12,000 students took part for an overall response rate of 45 per cent.

Each chart lists the universities in descending order of achievement. Responses are ordered according to the percentage of survey participants who chose the highest level of satisfaction (e.g., “very satisfied”).

Complete 2010 University Student Survey results available here.

For past year’s results, see here

Set aside your invincibility complex and protect those around you

Yesterday, I started thinking about the H1N1 vaccine.  The “swine flu” is something I’d only been sort of considering and only in the abstract.  It would cross my consciousness now and then when I read a news report or saw a mass-mail email from Dalhousie in my Inbox.  The news would filter in one ear and out the other.  It felt far away, inconsequential.  All of that ended this week when I found out that the swine flu has landed at my school.

Since we’re small, we often end up feeling separated from the outside world.  As I learned today in a class from another student, H1N1 showed up at Dal residence in September.  “It’s not a new thing,” she told me, in that patient tone I get a lot from Dal students.

I guess it’s not.  We have been hearing about this full-blown pandemic since June when the WHO declared it.  We’ve become experts at sneezing into arms and pumping the Purell as we traipse down the hall.  And this month, we’ve started hearing about the hows and wheres and whens of the promised vaccine.

I never get the flu shot.  Instead of getting the flu shot, I make fun of my friends who do get the yearly vaccine by telling them “Congratulations!  You won’t get the flu last year”.  Especially for young, healthy people like me, I have real questions about the efficacy of the usual flu vaccines.  I think that this led to my blase attitude over the new H1N1 vaccine.

I’m not the only one lacking much motivation.  Macleans.ca tells me that as the first wave has died down, so too has vaccine excitement:

A recent poll shows that, as of the first week of October, only one in three Canadians plan on getting the H1N1 vaccine, according to Harris/Decima. That’s down from 45 per cent in late August.

The picture the WHO painted for us seems sketchy now.  A lot of people have been getting H1N1… and then recovering.  People we even know.  And now as cold and flu season sets in, we get… the normal cold.  Where is this pandemic of appocalyptic proportions I was worried about?  I don’t see it.  So I stopped worrying.

When my degree of separation to H1N1 went from triple digits to single overnight, I woke up.   There is more at stake then my health, or worse, my midterms.   If I woke up tomorrow and realized that this head cold is actually H1N1, even if I immediately went into quarantine, I would have exposed a lot of people to my illness already:  all of the people in all of my classes; all of the people I rode on the bus with; the little girl I met on the quad; the little old ladies at the church.  My illness affects more people than just me.

Canada’s universities play on a world stage, but often fall short

Each November, for more than a decade and a half, Maclean’s has published its special issue ranking Canadian universities, comparing them on attributes such as resources, research, reputation and student and faculty quality. This exercise is, however, a purely made-in-Canada affair. We look at how McGill stacks up against the University of British Columbia and where Waterloo sits relative to Simon Fraser; we don’t ask how they compare with Stanford, Oxford or the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. But what if we did? What if we asked that favourite Canadian question: how are we doing? How do our universities compare to those in the rest of the world?

• Access: Canadians are arguably the most educated people on earth. Or at least the most schooled. Forty-seven per cent of working-age Canadians have a post-secondary credential, meaning university or college. That’s higher than any other developed country: the U.S. figure is just 39 per cent. What’s more, the number of Canadians with higher education is steadily rising. Fifty-five per cent of Canadians aged 25 to 34 attended university or college, compared to fewer than four out of 10 Canadians aged 55 to 64. Score one for Canadian higher ed. Continue reading Tale of the tape

Recent flip-flop by McGuinty government improves policy but could hurt party’s political image

Last Friday (as governments always release bad news on a Friday), the Ontario government announced the cancellation of planned improvements to student financial aid and said they would be scaling back the aid that is currently available. According to the province, the cuts are expected to save $103 million.

It is no secret that I thought the Textbook and Technology Grant was poor public policy and a political gimmick.

It was an election promise designed to maximize positive publicity for the government. The premise was simple: every full-time public post-secondary student attending an Ontario institution would receive a cheque from the government.

It sounded simple enough, so how hard could it be to implement? Get a list of students from each college and university, print a bunch of cheques, send them to Canada Post, and, voila!, every student in the province would get a cheque telling them how much Dalton McGuinty loves them.

Implementation wasn’t that easy, and the system seemed as if it had been designed to frustrate potential applicants.

The government decided there would be a web-based application that every student would use to get the grant. The government, perhaps as an indication of how little money they had to fulfill their election promises, did not engage in much promotion of the program. This resulted in many students not applying for the grant.

To add insult to injury, the government paid colleges and universities in order to provide student lists.

That said, it seems as if the government didn’t mind. After all, it didn’t matter that the grant was poor public policy; it was good politics. Premier Dalton McGuinty could go around the province saying he had “put into place brand new textbook and technology and distance grants…the first of its kind in the country.”

These cutbacks have made the grant a political weak spot for the government. The grants can now be called a broken election promise, which is a criticism to which McGuinty is vulnerable.

However, Friday’s announcement does improve the public policy aspect of these grants.

No longer will these grants go to individuals without any assessed financial need (which, in the overwhelming of incidences, correlates with a lack of financial need). This means money is no longer being directed to “student support,” which does nothing to actually support engagement in post-secondary education. For a student without financial need, the decision to continue in a post-secondary program will not be based on the cost of that education.

There is no longer a need for a costly administration process, as every student receiving OSAP will now automatically get the grant.

While not the best public policy, the new structure of the grant is definitely an improvement. True, there are more effective ways of delivering aid and the grant could be more targeted, but overall, the structure of the grant is better.

The fact the government is freezing the amount of the grant is disappointing. The government could have shown leadership and a true commitment to helping students in need, especially during this time of recession, by diverting funds to those with higher need instead of just cutting benefits to those students with low or no need.

Which universities get top marks? 90,000 students have their say

Almost every day for the past few years, Meg Martin has spent three hours on public transit, commuting to and from the University of Calgary. She looks forward to Wednesdays, when her first class doesn’t start until 11 a.m. and she can sleep in. Most other days, the fourth-year political science and English major is on campus by 9 a.m., and because she’s involved in student politics, she often stays late into the night. “The hardest part about being a commuter is the exhaustion,” says Martin. But early in her university career, she decided to get involved in student politics, in part to make new friends, have a place to rest and study between classes, and so that she could avoid feeling like an anonymous number and instead become “a member of some type of community.” Right now, she’s gearing up for student elections, where she’s running for vice-president, academic.

Want to read more? Full student survey results are available here.

Click here to go to the web-exclusive student surveys.

In some ways, Martin is the typical undergraduate: she’s 21, attends an urban university with a student body that is the size of a small city and lives at home with her parents. However, Martin is also deeply involved in campus activities—and that sets her apart from many students, at Calgary and elsewhere. She demonstrates some of the attributes of what the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) calls an “engaged student.”

Research has shown that various different forms of engagement—from Martin’s high level of extracurricular contact with peers to curricular extras such as the opportunity to work closely with professors—are likely to lead to more learning, and greater student success. In an effort to raise the level of student engagement at Calgary, officials hired Martin and three other students to help conduct surveys, focus groups and interviews of staff, students and administrators. “This is exciting, because it’ll give me the opportunity to get my hands dirty and connect with stakeholders at this university,” says Martin.

On the following pages, we present the NSSE results from 53 Canadian institutions. NSSE, a student survey that seeks to indirectly measure educational quality, has become an essential analytical tool used by most Canadian universities. The survey pinpoints what students are doing while they are in school and on campus; NSSE then generates benchmark results that show how well those activities and behaviours line up with what research shows are educational best-practices that are likely to lead to more and deeper learning. The higher a school’s scores on the five benchmarks—featured on the accompanying pages—the better the chance, according to NSSE, that its students are learning and getting the most out of their university experience.

The NSSE was developed a decade ago by a group of American education professors, in part as an alternative to university rankings such as those published by U.S. News & World Report (and Maclean’s). NSSE’s creators believed that a student survey of undergraduate quality might be able to provide universities, students and the wider public with essential information about each university. “An extensive research literature relates particular classroom activities and specific faculty and peer practices to high-quality undergraduate student outcomes,” wrote NSSE’s creators. The survey aimed to measure and promote the use of those best practices.

Students tell what they really think about their university, from the size of their classes to the quality of their profs.

Heres you will find additional results from the Canadian University Survey Consortium (CUSC).  The CUSC survey, which was commissioned by the universities, asks more than 100 questions about specific aspects of the undergraduate experience—inside the classroom and beyond—designed to provide universities with data to help them assess programs and services.

In 2008, 31 institutions took part, including two universities—UBC and the University of New Brunswick—that surveyed multiple campuses. Surveys were sent to a random sample of approximately 1,000 undergraduates in all years at each university. Institutions with fewer than 1,000 undergrads surveyed the entire cohort. Nearly 12,000 students responded.

In each chart, universities are listed in descending order. Order was determined by the percentage of students who chose the highest level of satisfaction of agreement when responding, for example, “excellent.”

Past year’s surveys are available here.
Want more? Full student survey results are available here.

Are universities a nest of richly subsidized radicals who are overpaid and underworked?

Though the moment is sure to fade away, the recent York University strike brought the challenges of the modern university to the attention of the chattering classes in central Canada — a fleeting benefit of the prolonged and unfortunate experiences of York’s students and workers.

In her column in Saturday’s Globe and Mail, Margaret Wente reminisces about her experiences with higher education, including time spent smoking dope at an unnamed university (likely UofT). Amidst her usual tried-and-tested barrage of insults and name-calling, Wente manages to hit on some of the biggest problems facing our universities at present:

The first problem is that there is no money, especially these days. The second problem is that universities are not terribly popular with the public, who tend to see them as a nest of richly subsidized tenured radicals who are overpaid and underworked. (Unfair, but not entirely.) Taxpayers are only willing to subsidize universities to the extent they believe they contribute to the national wealth. The third problem is that a vast proportion of the student body neither wants nor needs a traditional liberal education anyway. They have no desire to sit at the feet of cloistered masters debating truth and beauty. They are essentially there for the credentials.

Acadia’s new president continues a trend at Canadian universities

Acadia today announced that it has named Ray Ivany as its new president. Ivany has a long record as an academic administrator: he served as a vice-president at what was then the University College of Cape Breton (which has since transformed into Cape Breton University); he headed Nova Scotia Community College for nearly a decade; he is currently Chair of the Workers’ Compensation Board of Nova Scotia, and also sits on the boards of the Canadian Council on Learning, the Halifax Prior Learning Assessment Centre, and the Leading Edge Endowment Fund B.C. Regional Innovation Chair program. As an administrator of large organizations, Ivany has a distinguished track record. But one thing he doesn’t have is a Ph.D. Ivany is not an academic.

This makes Ivany part of an growing trend in academia. The position of university president—which used to be given to a distinguished professor—is now often going to someone who has made a career as a manager, not a researcher. Most other sectors of the economy long ago moved to this model: to become CEO of an airline, you don’t have to spend 20 years piloting 747s; to run a telecom company, you don’t have to spend a lifetime becoming your company’s most experienced telephone line installer; to run a TV network, you don’t have be a professional camera operator or have hosted your own TV show. What’s more, a university president is not only the manager of a large organization, he or she is managing an organization more decentralized than almost any other. Employees (professors) have an extremely high degree of autonomy (not to mention tenure), as do the various departments and schools within the university. The job requires managerial talents that are often more akin to politics than traditional, private-sector management. And a large and growing part of the president’s job is fund-raising: another unusual skill that combines elements of politics, salesmanship, vision and innate charm. None of these attributes is likely to be developed by spending most of one’s life conducting experiments and writing papers.

Hence the growing trend to look outside the academy. Ottawa last year chose as president former lawyer and politician Allan Rock. Also last year, Bishop’s installed as principal Michael Goldbloom, a lawyer who has had careers leading a lobby group (Alliance Quebec), running the Montreal YMCA, as a newspaper executive (with the Montreal Gazette and Toronto Star), and, from 2007 to 2008, as a vice-president at McGill. The University of Winnipeg is headed by a politician, Lloyd Axworthy. He has a Ph.D. but is not a career academic. The same goes for the chief at St. Francis Xavier, Sean Riley. He has a Ph.D., but his career prior to becoming president was spent in government and the private sector, not as a professor.

On the other hand, to be a university president, you need to have an intimate understanding of what a university is, and what its employees do. You have to be able to relate to them, and they have to be able to relate to you. Unlike private sector managers, university presidents are not really the boss of their organizations. But as a university president, you have a number of bosses, including, to some extent, the professors (who are not your “employees”. Not really.) It’s a very unusual situation. Even people who have spent years as professors inside the system sometimes forget the dynamics of the relationship, once they make it to the top. (See Larry Summers, one of the world’s leading economist, a former Treasury secretary and the appointee to head Barak Obama’s National Economic Council. He spent five years as president of Harvard, from 2001 to 2006, but was ultimately run out of office by the faculty).

Acadia is one of Canada’s oldest and most respected small liberal arts universities, but the last few years have brought serious challenges. It has spent ambitiously, but enrolment has not kept up with those ambitions. It is located in a part of the country that is facing a precipitous drop in its university-aged population. Like its peers, it has no choice but to market itself aggressively among high school students beyond its region. What’s more, the last president, Gail Dinter-Gottlieb, served through two faculty strikes, and resigned the presidency many months before her contract was up.

Last month, before his appointment, Ivany spoke at Acadia about his vision for the university’s future. There appears to have been considerable enthusiasm for him and his ideas. You can read a summary here.

Ignatieff’s excellent proposal: university funding should follow students across provincial borders

From the Halifax Chronicle Herald’s Q&A with Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff:

Q: Post-secondary funding goes to where the student comes from rather than where the student goes to school. Would you change that if you had the chance?

A: I think we should. It won’t be easy because provinces from which the students originate will make a claim that it should stay with them. But I think we ought to encourage and reward the universities that actually attract students from out of province, and there’s a nation-building reason for that. It’s not merely (that) you want to reward Atlantic Canada for having good universities, but you also want to give Canadians, young Canadians, a national experience.

One of the things that builds a nation is, you know, if someone is born in Ontario, spends some time in Atlantic Canada, someone in Atlantic Canada spends some time out in Calgary. So we ought to have a financing system that incentivizes that, that encourages (us) to create a generation of Canadians that have national experience.

Provinces like Nova Scotia get the short end of the stick in the current system. The province has such a strong network of successful universities that it attracts thousands of students from across the country — but instead of that being a success story, it’s a budgetary problem for Nova Scotia. Why? Because when a B.C. student goes to school at St. Francis Xavier or Dalhousie, B.C.’s higher education tax dollars (and federal dollars transfered to BC) don’t follow that student. The government of Nova Scotia, a net importer of students, ends up footing the bill. As a result, Nova Scotia’s most successful industry—higher education—is a drain on the province’s budget and a perennial problem. The system’s upside down.

This idea of having funding follow university students has been around for decades. I was advocating it way back in the last century, when I was writing Globe and Mail editorials. But it’s never had a chance to grow tired. It’s never been tried.