All Posts Tagged With: "university enrolment"

Recession drives the biggest spike in enrolment since 2003

Despite the shaky job market for university grads during the recession, or because of it, new enrolment figures show about 38,000 more students enrolled in Canadian universities this fall over last.

About 870,000 full-time students enrolled this year, an increase of 29,000 undergraduates and 9,000 graduate students from last year, according to figures released by the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada.

Herb O’Heron, a senior adviser at the AUCC, says it’s the biggest increase in enrolment since 2003 and the recession is driving demand for spots.

“Part of it is the recognition of the value of a degree,” he said. “Even in the midst of a recession, the jobs for university graduates continue to rise.”

Students and professors say they are encouraged by the display of faith in higher education, but remain skeptical about whether universities can deliver what they promise.

The spike in enrolment is occurring as cash-strapped governments make cuts to already underfunded universities, which, they say, degrades the quality of education for students who continue to pay sky high tuition fees.

James Turk, executive director of Canadian Association of University Teachers says while the government recognizes that education is key to economic recovery, it is not placing enough emphasis on funding.

To reach the funding level seen in the 1980s, when there were fewer university students, the government would need to increase funding by $4.2 billion a year, Turk said.

Meanwhile, as enrolment increases, universities cram students into the seats and aisles of already packed lecture halls, which degrades the quality of education students receive for their money.

Millennium Foundation says a degree is a great investment, but other studies raise a few caveats

If you have a university degree, you can expect to earn $746,000 more over your working life than someone with only a high school diploma. The information is contained in a study released today by the Canadian Millennium Scholarship Foundation, authored by Joseph Berger and Andrew Parkin. The authors also found that Canadians with only a high school diploma are two and a half times more likely to be unemployed than a university graduate. College graduates enjoy higher earnings than those with only a high school education, but the earning gap is not as wide and their lifetime payoff is only about half that of university graduates.

Bergin and Parker say they wrote this report in in order to counter “a series of recent suggestions that somehow we have too many [post-secondary] students in Canada, not too few.” They write that “the evidence about the positive returns to post-secondary education is so well-known that it seems unnecessary to review it again.” There’s pretty much no refuting that, if you take the income levels of all those with a university education and compare it to the incomes of all those with only high school, university looks is one heck of a good investment. College similarly looks like a good investment, but university appears to be a much better one. A few years ago, I opened our annual Rankings issue with an article entitled “The Best Investment Money Can Buy.” I estimated, based on a less thorough analysis of Statscan data than Berger and Parkin offer, that the return on a university degree was about $1 million dollars in extra lifetime earnings.

I still hold to the view that university offer serious economic benefits to students and society — but I have some caveats. Education is the fount of progress: social, scientific and economic. A more skilled society will be a more prosperous and successful society. But the more I look at our higher education system, the more frequently I see disconnects between the true statement “our society needs more educated people” and the not necessarily equivalent statement that “our society needs more people with university degrees.” The latter should equal the former, but unfortunately that’s not always the case. There’s lots of evidence that an increasing number of kids are simply being pushed through the system: they may get a university degree (and before that, a high school diploma) without having learned anywhere near as much as the credential suggests they should have. A few weeks ago, a chemistry professor told me about how some students in his third-year and fourth-year classes — students who are majoring in chemistry — never learned the most basic elements of the first-year material. He’s not sure how they made it in to upper-year courses; they’re not educated enough to be called scientists. But they’re going to get a B.Sc. What exactly is their degree worth? Somewhat less than the ideal.

A number of commentators, such as professors James Cote and Anton Allahar, authors of this book (and a related blog) have said that we are lowering standards in order to raise enrolment, devaluing higher education in the process. I’ve got a lot of sympathy for Cote and Allahar’s argument that we are putting too much emphasis on getting more people into higher education, and too little emphasis on what they do once they get there — what they actually learn. Cote and Allahar similarly point to a focus on credentials over learning in some high school systems — which deal with weak students by shoving them through the system regardless of actual performance or learning, raising everyone’s grades, raising graduation rates and giving the illusion of educational progress. More knowledge/skill/education are good things, for the individual and for our society and economy. However, we can’t just assume that more schooling, of whatever type, in whatever field and of whatever quality, equals education/learning/skills. Our system should aim to make those linkages — and this is where Parkin/Berger and Cote/Allahar surely agree. We can’t automatically assume that more people with credentials (whether that is a high school diploma or a B.A.) equals more people with knowledge and skills that lead to higher returns to themselves and to society.

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.