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Learning at these three schools happens outside the lecture hall

Concordia University

Like Rodney Dangerfield and rolling in the mud, Concordia University has a tendency to be underappreciated. Long considered the red-headed stepchild of Montreal’s two English universities, it is often lost in the ivy-tinged shadow of McGill. Many wear their alma mater’s scruffier-than-thou reputation on their sleeve. “Concordia is to McGill what the United Church is to Catholicism,” says one-time contemporary dance major Amy Blackmore. Still, the university has consistently found itself on the wrong end of Maclean’s rankings.

But while the numbers may show the 30,000-student university has certain challenges, they obscure many of the innovative aspects of a Concordia education that attract people like Amy Blackmore. Case in point: the faculty of fine arts, based in the glass-and-steel confines of the university’s new Engineering, Computer Science and Visual Arts Integrated Complex. By design, the roughly 3,700 fine arts students live and work in one of Montreal’s busiest strips—from which students and faculty alike draw inspiration. “There’s no sense of there being an ivory tower here,” says Chris Salter, a computer design professor. “There are no closed-off spaces. There’s more of what I’d call seepage.”

“Seepage” is an odd yet apt description of the department’s philosophy. Students who choose fine arts won’t simply learn their chosen craft; more often than not, they’ll learn how to put it to use once they graduate. The department of design and computation arts doesn’t simply teach the esoteric aspects of the craft, but the practical as well. “In any given week I’ll be teaching the academic, such as media theory, to the hard-core technical, like digital audio design,” says Salter. The department offers a double major in computer science and computation arts, the only one of its kind in North America.

If there is a technological pièce de résistance in the department, it’s the Hexagram Institute. Established in 2001, it is the conglomeration of 16 so-called “new media labs” devoted solely to what the university calls “new processes, creative communities and innovative works or prototypes.” Translation: students get to dream up and make really, really cool stuff.

D. Andrew Stewart, a Concordia graduate, is using Matralab (one of the Hexagram’s spaces) to hone the T-Stick, a length of plumbing tube stuffed with electronics and layered with a touch-sensitive surface. The tube reacts to movement and touch, and when hooked up to a computer it can be manipulated to make custom sounds (a flute, maybe, or a sample of Stewart yelling something quasi-obscene). “It’s all open source,” Stewart says, “meaning you could build one yourself with instructions from the Internet. The gyroscope in it is from a Nintendo Wii controller.”

Matralab director Sandeep Bhagwati, who is also one of nine Canada Research Chairs in fine arts, says Stewart’s T-Stick is typical of the department’s beyond-the-box, interdisciplinary approach to art and performance. Indeed, it’s what attracted him to Concordia. “I have a very structured background as an orchestra director and composition professor,” Bhagwati says. “I really don’t like the divides. I needed input from people who were not musicians.”

Music therapy is another example of the department’s mix of theory and practicality. Music majors typically had three choices once they graduate: teaching, performing or gut-wrenching unemployment. You might say that Concordia’s music therapy program is a welcome fourth option. One of only two master’s-level programs in the country, music therapy students spend three days a week during the 12-month period (a total of 1,200 hours) working at various prenatal, health and palliative care centres, as well as women’s shelters and special education facilities around Montreal.

For professor P. K. Langshaw, interaction with the community at large goes both ways. In 2001, Langshaw began an ad hoc outreach program between her students and those of Dans La Rue, a resource centre for street kids featuring an alternative school. The reason: Langshaw, whose many specialties include computer art design, wanted to demystify the subject for DLR students. Her instinct has legs: today, DLR students can take classes at Concordia, earning the equivalent of six credits for producing university-level works. “For a lot of DLR kids, digital self-expression isn’t something that’s necessarily in their realm,” Langshaw says. “But here they are treated the same as any Concordia student.” It’s a fitting partnership: Concordia itself is dans la rue—and proud to be far away from the ivory towers of certain other universities.

- Martin Patriquin

‘You are the Weird Mom,’ whispered my daughter. ‘There’s one on every tour and you are it.’

The first stop on the university road trip that my 17-year-old daughter Hayley and I took in August probably shouldn’t have been my alma mater, the University of Virginia. Her uni tour wasn’t about me. At least, that’s what I kept telling myself.

I’m an American who has spent the last 16 years living in Toronto, raising two Canadian children. I’ve grappled with the politics (you don’t vote directly for the prime minister?), the history (you won the War of 1812?) and the baffling modesty (hey, the pursuit of happiness is my inalienable right). So I’ve long imagined that when Hayley applied to universities, some would be in the States. She spent her first year in Los Angeles, and I thought she should experience what it’s like to live in her birth country rather than next to it. But because even I have figured out that Canadian universities deliver an equal education at a much lower cost, I posited that the only schools worth heading south for were the Dream Team, the super-high-end institutions that offer the moon—and, not incidentally, generous financial aid.

Hayley doesn’t have a particular school or subject focus yet; her objective is a wide-ranging liberal arts education. So we took the loose approach: we’d pack a credit card and a stack of CDs, chart a course—the University of Virginia, Georgetown, Yale, Brown, McGill, Queens—stay in roadside motels, and see what happened. What happened was this: Hayley displayed the usual anxieties about Getting Into University and Starting Her Future. And I decided that the best way to help her through it was to go barking mad.

It began three minutes after we pulled into Charlottesville, home of UVa. Okay, so I may have been driving a tad erratically, making screeching U-turns whenever something caught my eye. And it’s possible that my running commentary—“Oh my God, they knocked down my dorm!”—was more fascinating to me than to her. (I graduated in 1984. Things changed. Duh.) But I thought she might perk up as we walked the leafy, colonnaded campus built by Thomas Jefferson in 1819 with bricks from his works at Monticello. (I’d been a tour guide there, so I was full of fun facts.) I showed her my favorite deli, where I was—perhaps inordinately—pleased to see that “my” wild turkey sandwich was still No. 1 on the chalkboard menu. I was expecting her to be charmed by the things that had charmed me (“Isn’t it cool that Jefferson made the library the quad’s focal point, when at other schools it’s a church?”). But no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t quite hide the “Yes, but can we go now?” in her voice.

It should have been a reminder that my daughter isn’t mine anymore, and hasn’t been for a long time. Eventually, Hayley articulated what she was feeling: she wanted to like my school, for my sake. But another part of her wanted to dislike it, because she wanted to make a different choice, live a life different from mine. You’d think I’d have been able to figure that out.

Our next stops were better. Georgetown, in Washington, was chockablock with political internships and study abroad programs—all of which Hayley realized she wanted, the minute she saw it. The school also guarantees residence for all four years, some in chic row houses that—okay, sue me—I would die to live in myself. Brown students design their own curriculums from a mind-blowing spectrum of subjects. And at Yale—ohhh, mommy really wanted to go to Yale. No class has more than 30 students, there’s a Gutenberg Bible in the library, and a master who lives in each freshman dorm arranges intimate teas for the students with guests like Bill Gates and Denzel Washington. At one point during the Yale speech I smacked my hands audibly against my face in wonder. “You are the Weird Mom,” Hayley whispered, pretending to edge away. (I’m sure she was only pretending.) “There’s one on every tour and you are it.”

Still, we could be a good team. She’d dole out my road food, and we’d alternate CDs, playing each other songs that meant something to us. (Father and Son by Cat Stevens: Hayley was bemused to find out that I, too, had once related to the lyric, “From the moment I could talk, I was ordered to listen.”) We figured out that it’s wise to attend both the formal information sessions and student-led tours, and that they fill up early. We developed an attack strategy: snag a nearby hotel room the night before, scope out the campus in the morning, and hit the road by lunch.

Unfortunately, we also learned that every other family on our uni route not only knew all that already, but they’d been planning for it for months, if not years. We kept seeing the same faces—the humble father from Guatemala and his dazzling son who spoke fluent Mandarin—who came equipped with hotel reservations and restaurant lists. They’d mastered the lingo. (Did you know that a student entering Grade 12 is called a “rising senior”? I didn’t.) They’d memorized the school stats and entry requirements, and rattled them off like Gatling guns: the Ivy Leagues like to see a 2,200 (out of 2,400) on the SAT, and high 700s (out of 800) on the SAT 2’s (individual subject tests). Alternately, you could skip the SAT and take the ACT, but then you’d need to brush up on science, not vocab. Apply for early decision to indicate your commitment, but only to schools that resubmit your application if the early decision is no.

I was overwhelmed. (Not to mention irked: would it kill Canadian high schools to give Grade 11 students information about applying in the States, so they could have the option?) Back in 1980, my “approach” to school selection was akin to picking names out a hat. There were no such things as SAT 2’s, I’d never heard of the ACT, and no one took me on a uni tour. Many of these parents, by contrast, were towing kids who were entering Grade 11. And some were entering Grade 10. Yikes. I’d forgotten what a big business university is down south. These kids (and their parents) wanted a capital-f Future, and they were charging in to get it like Rommel into Egypt.

Hayley is a dedicated student, she has what the U.S. admissions folks call “competitive” grades, and she’s always displayed a keen self-knowledge about which schools were right for her. I could see that two universities in particular had lit her up. But she’s also hard on herself, and when confronted with a mob that is storming toward something, her inclination is to pull back. So I shouldn’t have been surprised when she announced that she liked the U.S. schools. Loved a couple, in fact. But she wasn’t sure she would apply.

I hit the roof. Literally: I smacked the roof of my car. I wedged myself into my fallback position—guilt-inducement, learned at my own mother’s knee—and stayed there, loudly. At one point I heard myself hollering, “You are making this decision out of spite! You will regret it for the rest of your life!” and I saw how ridiculous I was. But I couldn’t stop.

In the miles of silence that followed, I had to own up to it: perhaps some of that, um, passion was my own regret talking (all right, yelling). I didn’t make the most of my university years. I cared too much about landing a job, and not enough about enriching my mind. I would love to have that time back, to do it more fully and without fear.

But mostly it was about my daughter, and my profound hopes for her. At schools on both sides of the border, my eyes kept filling with tears, not because I’m hormonally challenged, but because the belief that one should dream as grandly as possible moved me. At 48, I know something Hayley doesn’t: most people end up living smaller lives than they’d imagined. I want her to live the biggest life she can.

In early October we were on the road again, driving to Buffalo for Hayley’s second stab at the SAT. We laughed (sort of) at my August histrionics. Hayley told me she’d made her decision: she was applying to Canadian and U.S. schools—not because I wanted her to, but because she wanted to. She’d be thrilled to be accepted into any of them, and she hopes I’ll be thrilled for her. (I will.) She wants to attend a university that “scares me, but in a good way.” And what impressed her most about her uni tour was the number of people who cared deeply about where they went to school—how much they yearned for it, how hard they worked for it. “I saw how many people really value their education,” she said. “I want to value mine that way.”

I could be letting myself off easy, but maybe every university tour is fraught. Maybe it’s meant to be. By the time our children are on it, they’re not children anymore. They’re adults, making the first major decision of their adult lives, and we parents have to stand down and let them. It’s Hayley’s road now. I’m just glad to be along for the ride.

We find the trend toward race-based admissions policies in some U.S. schools to be deplorable

Maclean’s annual University Rankings issue is our most popular and most discussed magazine of the year. The 2010 edition, released two weeks ago, was no exception. Alongside our comprehensive rankings of Canadian schools, we also tackled the biggest issues facing today’s university students. There were stories dealing with school stress, problem roommates, difficult school choices and sex. And when students told us race is becoming a conversation on Canadian campuses, we took a closer look at that as well.

Our reporters Stephanie Findlay and Nicholas Köhler spoke to university students, professors and administrators about campus racial balance and its implications. The resulting story was titled: ‘Too Asian?’: a term used in the U.S. to talk about racial imbalance at Ivy League schools is now being whispered on Canadian campuses—by everyone but the students themselves, who speak out loud and clear.”

The article has generated a great deal of response, a representative sample of which is included in this week’s Letters (page six). Some of the comments we have seen on the Internet and in other media have suggested that by publishing this article, Maclean’s views Canadian universities as “Too Asian,” or that we hold a negative view of Asian students.

Nothing could be further from the truth. As our story relates, the phrase “Too Asian?” is a direct quote from the title of a panel discussion at the 2006 meeting of the National Association for College Admission Counseling where experts examined the growing tendency among U.S. university admission officers to view Asian applicants as a homogenous group. The evidence suggests some of the most prestigious schools in the U.S. have abandoned merit as the basis for admission for more racially significant—and racist—criteria.

We find the trend toward race-based admission policies in some American schools deplorable, as do many of our readers. Our article notes that Canadian universities select students regardless of race or creed. That, in our view, is the best and only acceptable approach: merit should be the sole criteria for entrance to higher education in Canada, and universities should always give preference to our best and brightest regardless of cultural background. This position was stated clearly in the article: “Canadian institutions operate as pure meritocracies when it comes to admissions, and admirably so,” reporters Findlay and Köhler wrote.

Through hard work, talent and ambition, Asian students have been highly successful in earning places in Canada’s institutions of higher learning. They, like all of our high achievers, deserve respect and admiration. Every one of them is a source of pride to their fellow Canadians.

One final note about the headline. Although the phrase “Too Asian?” was a question and, again, a quotation from an authoritative source, it upset many people. We expected that it would be provocative, but we did not intend to cause offence.

From the editors

Carleton University has found a new way to keep students from flunking out

At the end of her first year at Carleton University, Stephanie Hamway was struggling with poor grades and a program she didn’t like. “I rushed into university before I fully realized what I wanted to do,” she says. But after spring finals, she got an email from the school’s Student Academic Success Centre, offering to help her create a plan to fix it. Today, in her third year, she has an A average.

Identifying at-risk students and getting them the help they need to stay on track is an obstacle all universities encounter, though some more than others. Retention rates, measured as the number of students who go on from first year to second year, range from a low of 70.3 per cent at Brandon University to a high of 95 per cent at Queen’s University.

Some universities, like Carleton, have realized that students won’t ask for help until it’s too late. That’s why, after mid-terms and finals, the academic success centre reviews grades from the registrar and contacts struggling students directly. They aren’t always easy to convince. “Identifying them is one thing,” says Suzanne Blanchard, associate vice-president of students and enrolment. “Getting them in for help, we’re working on.”

Blanchard estimates that only 30 to 40 per cent of students accept help. To try to reach the school’s goal of helping three-quarters of struggling students, Carleton added a walk-in program in September for students staring down an impending exam. Hamway didn’t need convincing after she was contacted. Her adviser laid out the options: continue, drop out, take a year off, transfer to a college or change majors. She opted to switch majors. “I love the program I’m in now, which has given me a lot of motivation,” she says.

Research on what improves retention is sparse, but a recent study by Ross Finnie, a University of Ottawa economist, determined that the conventional wisdom may be wrong. Traditional thinking has been that at-risk students come from particular demographics, like francophones in Ontario, or visible minorities. Finnie found little correlation between coming from a group that is underrepresented at university and making it beyond first year. He concluded that universities should focus instead on individual students with low marks.

Hamway is glad that Carleton is doing just that. It helped her realize something important: “There’s a lot of support for people who may not have the grades—they shouldn’t just give up.”

Today’s students keep strict boundaries with the strangers with whom they share the rent

When Logan Nash decided to move in with three other male students in second-year university, he imagined it would be like Joey Tribbiani’s apartment on Friends—everybody hanging around, sharing pizza and beer, playing air hockey and being, well, friendly.

It didn’t turn out that way.

Instead, the 22-year-old graphic design student found himself living in a quiet two-bedroom with only one roommate (the other two students having opted at the last minute to live at home with their parents for financial reasons). Instead of hanging around shooting the breeze and cooking spaghetti with meatballs, he and his roommate opted to live separate lives. His roommate had a severe nut allergy so food was strictly divided. The same went for toiletries. They split up the cleaning duties, conducted separate social lives and even organized their class schedules so they wouldn’t have to be in the apartment at the same time. “We were in the same program so it seemed better if we didn’t hang out together too much,” he says. “So most of the time we just did our own thing. The purpose of living together wasn’t for company, it was for each one to pay our half of the rent.”

Nash’s experience is not unusual. Many students today opt to live with people they’ve only recently met online, a situation that encourages social boundaries. More than any generation before them, today’s students are accustomed to personalized entertainment—TV shows and movies are downloaded onto phones and laptops, boom boxes have given way to iPods and noise-reduction headphones, texting is the new talking. Add this to the fact that more and more students come from fragmented families where communal activities like family dinners or en masse holidays are infrequent at best, and it’s not surprising student life is following suit.

While campus movies like Animal House and The Perfect Score might perpetuate the notion that university house-sharing is one long potluck or keg party, do not be fooled: most students these days are leading independent lives off campus—and for the most part, they like it that way.

“With the rise of capitalism we began to focus more on the individual than on the collective,” says Oonagh O’Hagan, author of the book I Lick My Cheese: And Other Notes From the Frontline of Flatsharing. “The result is that most of us go through a period of our lives where we end up living with strangers. Knowing how to deal with that is a real test of character.” O’Hagan’s book explores the comical side of roommate alienation through comic passive aggression. (“I pay rent, what do you do?” reads one. Another: “Dear Lakey, the zoo called, they’d like you back by 8 a.m.”) The goal, of course, is not to get to the point of deranged note-writing, and O’Hagan says having clear boundaries between roommates—both socially and chore-related—is a good place to start.

“I have some roommates who’ve become good friends but it’s very rare,” she says. “In the end, the experience of living with other people makes you more durable. You realize who your real friends are and that you don’t have to be friends with everyone all the time.”

But as students abandon for good the communal living ideals espoused in Plato’s Republic, is something greater being lost? In a recent column for the New York Times, Maureen Dowd bemoaned the advent of Facebook applications like RoomBug or the site URoomSurf.com, where university students now profile prospective roommates according to personal hygiene and politics instead of choosing from the people they randomly happen to know. The rise of such sites, says Dowd, is indicative of a student culture that fears the conflict and social quagmires that invariably ensue from sharing our lives—and beer stash—with a bunch of complete strangers. “As you leave behind high school to redefine and even reinvent yourself as adult, you need exposure to an array of different ideas, backgrounds and perspectives—not a cordon of clones,” she writes.

But respecting social boundaries doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t pal around. Take Maggie Giles, 21, a media studies student in her fourth year at the University of Western Ontario. When she and her best friend decided to move in with another student in second year, they initially tried to share everything—chipping in for groceries, cooking meals, leaving the dishes until they could do a big group cleanup. But as they settled into campus life, that changed. “We’re still good friends but we realized it’s not necessary to do everything together,” she says. “We’ve definitely slowed down on that front.”

These days, Giles and her roomies keep their food stores separate—hoarding snack food like cookies and chips (what Giles describes as “easy grab” items that are vulnerable to roommate thievery) in their own rooms for safekeeping. They have separate toiletries and distinct social lives. As for chores, they now realize the best way to keep a student house clean is to have a “leave it the way you found it” policy, especially when it comes to dishes. “You have to realize you’re living with two other people and they may not take kindly to the level of grunge you’re comfortable with,” she says.

Christiane Orsini, a veterinary sciences graduate student at the University of Guelph, describes a similarly arm’s-length relationship with her housemates. She lives in a large split-level house with three women on the main floor and male students in the basement. They keep their food on assigned shelves, share a very crowded fridge and freezer, cook and socialize separately, and never have big parties. “We get along fairly well, but mostly we keep to our own busy schedules,” she says.

It’s quite common for students to want less of a less communal living experience as their university life progresses, says Darren Vanecko, president of Places4Students.com, a St. Catharines, Ont.-based Web directory that has taken over nearly half of the university housing directories in Canada (its clients include Dalhousie, U of T, University of Windsor and Saint Mary’s University, as well as many U.S. campuses). Students these days, he says, expect more from their living spaces in terms of amenities—separate fridges, bathrooms, or cleaning services built into the rent are not uncommon requests—and less from the people they live with. Many come to his site to meet roommates, or specifically ask for one-bedroom apartments or living situations in which their privacy will be respected. “Students are asking for more and frankly, in this market they can get it,” he says.

And while it all sounds very grown up, does it mean that housemates don’t have fun together anymore? Absolutely not, says Giles. “We still like to hang out and watch Grey’s Anatomy together every week,” she says. “We just tend to do it with our separate laptops open on our laps at the same time.”

The generation now entering university is the most anxious since the 1930s

By the time Victoria Ciciretto left her family’s home in Kleinburg, Ont., to live and study at the University of Toronto, the 18-year-old was already a seasoned world traveller. “I’d gone away for a month in Europe for summer school in Grade 10,” she says. “I took a Grade 12 course in Greece,” she adds. “And the year before last, I studied English in England.”

Presumably, moving 40 km away from home would be easy, but instead the arts and science student was filled with anxiety. “For my first week, I was like, ‘Oh my god, why would people say this is the most amazing time of your life?’ ”

She was nervous about living in a dorm, about classes and homework, about what major to choose and if she would make friends. There was a reason she could handle summers overseas, but was scared of university. “I had really good friends with me when I went travelling,” she says. “When I went to university, I didn’t know anybody.”

Ciciretto’s concerns are not unusual. For some, anxiety is a normal reaction to stress and loneliness. For others, it’s a serious mental health issue—one that afflicts university-aged students more than any other age group.

Statistics Canada’s 2006 Community Health Survey of Mental Health and Well-being revealed that people aged 15 to 24 are most likely to experience anxiety disorders, with 6.5 per cent reporting an anxiety disorder in the past year. Studies in Canada and the U.S. have also shown that about 30 per cent of post-secondary students suffer from a mental health or substance abuse issue, compared to 18 per cent of the general population. Researchers from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland found today’s college students suffer from anxiety and depression at a higher rate than every generation since the 1930s.

Why all this stress during what’s supposed to be the most exciting time of life? Michael Van Ameringen, a professor in the department of psychiatry at McMaster University, explains that it may be timing. The co-director of the anxiety disorders clinic on campus since 1985 says students are at the peak age of susceptibility. “The university cohort is entering the age of risk for onset of psychological disorders,” he says. The first episodes of clinical depression, panic disorders and generalized anxiety typically manifest in the late teens or early twenties. That risk, paired with normal stress about the whole university or college experience, makes it the most vulnerable time.

Novelist Patricia Pearson swam through her undergraduate degree in her hometown of Toronto, but generalized anxiety disorder hit her during grad school, when she found herself alone in Chicago at the age of 23. In her book, A Brief History of Anxiety: Yours and Mine, she concludes that anxiety is more often a product of culture and circumstance (like loneliness) than something written in our biology. “There is data on the fact that in a country like Mexico, where there’s less onus on the individual and it’s more collective, anxiety doesn’t last as long,” she says.

The Mexican example and other cross-national psychological literature revealed that tight-knit communities with collective rituals in place—say churchgoing or fiestas—tended to be healthier. “You don’t feel as isolated and you don’t feel like it’s all about you,” she says. But university, Pearson points out, is often all about you; it’s a period of isolation from social supports.

In Generation Me, Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University, attributes anxiety to the individualism that characterizes the group born after the 1970s and she links it to unrealistic optimism. Yes, according to Twenge, there is such a thing as too much optimism: young people (“Generation Me”) have been brought up with unrealistic expectations about how their lives will turn out. “When things don’t happen the way they expect, they can hit anxiety and depression,” she says.

In other words, they have less access to the traditional social connections that promote mental health, such as closeness to family, stable relationships and a strong sense of community, so they’re more likely to experience anxiety disorders. If anxiety becomes disruptive, Twenge suggests students should pay a visit to the university counselling service, or talk to elders who have life experience. “But these rough periods can be a learning experience, too,” she says. “Things don’t have to be perfect all the time.”

Profs from St. John’s to Victoria have had it with the wreckage of bad grammar

First year students arrive on campuses with their laptops, an iPod, an iPad, a Twitter account, a personal blog and a Facebook page. “They are so expressive and they have so much to share,” says Margie Clow-Bohan, director of the writing centre at Dalhousie. “But the writing skills need work.”

Most of Clow-Bohan’s colleagues would say she is too kind. The class of 2011 is opinionated and expressive but they can’t structure an essay, don’t know how to write an introduction, write paragraphs that are two pages long, and have murderously bad grammar. This is the lament of professors from Victoria to St. John’s. “The grammar sucks and the writing is awful.” So says Paul Budra, associate dean and English professor at Simon Fraser University, about the quality of the essays he sees: fragments, comma splices, apostrophe, pronoun and agreement errors, and tense mistakes. High school teachers are failing students, he says. “There’s this emphasis on expressing yourself, on this idea that if you get it on the page, it will be fine,” he says. “It’s not.”

“Universities teach subject matter, not writing,” says Richard Stren, a political science professor at the University of Toronto. “It is assumed that by reading academic articles, students will absorb how to write. It doesn’t work. I gave out a lot of Cs.”

“Teachers are afraid to teach grammar,” says Visnja Cuturic, an ESL instructor who teaches grammar and academic writing at the University of Toronto. “They know the rules instinctively, but they can’t teach them. And rote learning is a thing of the past.”

I know this first-hand. I teach a college English class at a downtown college in Toronto. The first time I collected essays from my students, who are a variety of ages but have all received a high school degree, I was stunned. Subjects didn’t agree with verbs. Sentences started on page one and kept up the fight until page two. Commas were either used not at all or appeared in startling places. It wasn’t that there weren’t any ideas in the papers; it was that they were so buried by the wreckage of bad grammar it would have taken the jaws of life to free them.

“I believe writing well is intricately tied up with thinking clearly. As a responsible citizen, you have to grapple with issues at a very deep level, and if you can’t do that on the page, you’ll have trouble,” says Ginny Ryan, director of the writing centre at Memorial University in St. John’s. MUN students come to her writing centre for hour-long sessions; the students get one-on-one attention from a graduate student in their discipline. Since 2008, MUN engineering students are required to write an essay on ethics. Ryan visited the engineering classes and taught essay writing to the students. “It’s difficult to escape MUN without some kind of writing skill,” she says.

Dalhousie requires students to take two “writing-intensive” courses before they graduate. Erin Wunker, an English professor at Dalhousie, teaches a year-long introduction to literature class, which is considered writing intensive. Wunker doesn’t make it an easy ride. “I wear them down,” she says. “I tell them they’ll use these skills if they are writing a persuasive demand for a raise or explaining, in a cogent fashion, the source of a patient’s illness.” Wunker matches students with a peer-editing buddy. “They’re not allowed to write sycophantic, empty comments like: ‘I liked your essay!’ ” she says. “They have to write critical and thoughtful things, or they don’t pass,” she says. The improvement is astonishing. “The students always say they dreaded the peer editing but it turned out to be the most helpful part of the course.”

There are five writing centres at the University of Toronto where undergrads can get help from graduate students. “There was a sense that we weren’t reaching enough students,” says Sandy Welsh, a sociology professor and vice-dean of teaching and learning in the faculty of arts and science at the University of Toronto. Enter the Writing Instruction for TAs (WIT) program. Ivan Kalmar, an anthropology professor at U of T, teaches an introductory course with 1,200 students. The class is broken up into groups of 30 students, and each student attends eight tutorials, run by WIT-trained TAs. Every student submits an essay proposal before turning in an essay, and the TAs, Kalmar says, catch the big errors before the final paper comes in. “It’s an opportunity for students in a massive class to get one-on-one feedback,” he says. “The marks have gone up tremendously, and the students say the tutorials were the most rewarding part of the course.”

“We shouldn’t be waiting until smaller classes in the second or third year to introduce writing skills,” says Kalmar.

Satellite campuses abroad aren’t just offering degrees, they’re selling our values

The new campus of the University of Waterloo has lots of Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Iranian students, but none from Ontario. You’ll see more hijabs than Flames jerseys at the University of Calgary’s new nursing school. That’s because both schools are in the Middle East—and they aren’t meant for Canadians.

Waterloo’s new campus in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and Calgary’s three-year-old nursing school in Doha, Qatar, reflect a new strategy by Canadian universities to recruit bright students, train professors, and build connections throughout the world. These new campuses aren’t just small universities either. They’re mini diplomatic missions. If you ask Amit Chakma, president of the University of Western Ontario, they’re also the key to Canada’s future place in the world.

Under the leadership of Canada’s new Governor General, David Johnston (who was president of the University of Waterloo at the time), Chakma helped oversee the development of the new Dubai campus of Waterloo before moving into the president’s chair at Western. He’s not shy about his ambitions for the school. “The British education system of the 19th century, particularly Oxford, Cambridge and the London School of Economics, influenced the rest of the world,” says Chakma. “It produced leaders like Gandhi, who then took what they learned back to their home countries. Turn the clock forward and you don’t influence the world through your economic or military power, but through your people, ideas and connectivity. At the end of the day, it’s the people who build the country’s bridges,” he explains. In other words, the campuses will help Canadian ideas—and Canadian values—spread through the new relationships they foster. “Think of the difficulties we’re having between the Islamic world and the Western world,” he says. “Why wouldn’t we be offering opportunities of a modern, liberal, Western education for those in Dubai who want to take advantage of it?”

The first two years of Waterloo U.A.E.’s programs (which include chemical and civil engineering, financial analysis and information technology management) are taught by Waterloo professors, who build connections with businesses and potential research partners during their residencies in Dubai. The students, many of them sons and daughters of foreigners working in the Middle East, will spend the final two years on campus in Waterloo, where they build connections with Canadian students and professors. After four years, they earn a coveted Canadian degree.

The Waterloo graduates then make good candidates for admission as immigrants under the new Canadian Experience Class, an immigration scheme that allows foreigners who have studied here to fast-track their residency, so long as they’re employed in the year after graduation. If they don’t choose to stay in Canada, they will take their well-travelling Canadian degree and spread the good word about Canada abroad. “What happens when someone gets a degree from Canada is the person retains their link to Canada all their life,” explains Leo Rothenburg, vice-president, international at Waterloo. “We call them ambassadors.” One day, there will be as many as 3,000 such ambassadors graduating every year.

Calgary’s nursing school offers students from around the world the opportunity to earn a Canadian degree in the Middle East. (Unlike Waterloo’s program, they spend the entire four years in Qatar.) Gail Fredrickson, acting public affairs director for the University of Calgary Qatar, says her school is helping Canada’s image in a region “of growing importance.” She says that Qatar’s people are fascinated by Canada. Case in point: two nursing students who travelled to Calgary were profiled by the local newspaper when they returned. “It was big news in Qatar!” says Fredrickson.

The Canadian branch campuses aren’t just in the Middle East. Since 2005, the University of Waterloo has partnered with Nanjing University to offer the University of Waterloo environmental engineering program. Chinese students spend two years in China before arriving at Waterloo. Once in Canada, the students are offered classes where they brush up on their English while learning everything from how to navigate Canadian grocery shops to how to use the local bus system. Graduates of the program earn both a Chinese and a Canadian degree. After that, about 50 per cent stay in Canada for graduate work. Some stay permanently.

Unlike the many lucrative graduate programs Canadian schools have set up overseas, these undergraduate campuses are not money-making schemes. Waterloo says they have not turned a profit in the U.A.E.—nor is that their goal. Waterloo hopes to profit in a non-monetary sense by providing its Canadian undergrads with the opportunity to study in foreign countries, while still learning from Canadian professors. So far, the school has only provided a few co-op students with experience in China and Dubai. But next year, Waterloo will offer engineering students the option to spend six four to six weeks in Nanjing.

According to Leo Rothenburg, Waterloo has already profited in another way from the bridges it’s building overseas. Waterloo professor Lei Xu was able to develop a new low-cost steel-frame structure that can withstand earthquakes after meeting new research partners on the other side of the Pacific in 2005. After the Sichuan earthquake in 2008 killed upwards of 69,000 people, the Chinese government asked him to help make new cities safer. “Research that happened in Waterloo is being applied to a make houses safer in China,” explains a proud Rothenburg. “That wouldn’t have happened without these relationships.”

Waterloo is getting noticed, too. “I once chatted with a gentlemen in the lounge of Beijing airport who was an official from the Housing Ministry,” says Rothenburg, who gave the man a business card. “He knew Waterloo—because he knew about [Xu’s] work.”

Photo: These engineering students will come to Canada to finish their degrees

Student unions pour money into political causes that many members don’t even know about, let alone support

The story made headlines everywhere: it was Feb. 11, 2009, and Daniel Ferman was a member of Drop YFS, a group dedicated to overthrowing the York Federation of Students. Drop YFS was presenting a petition with 5,000 signatures—enough to stage a coup of sorts. They were protesting the student union’s support for a teachers’ strike, which would potentially leave students on the hook for missed class time. They were also against the union backing the Israeli Apartheid Week, which many pro-Israel students despised. As the press conference began, Ferman and his fellow Drop YFS members were faced with a crush of student union members who came in to denounce the petition rally. After a volley of shouting, the crowd moved to the Hillel student lounge where some of the Drop YFS members took refuge. “Students were barricaded in the lounge,” says Ferman, who was Hillel @ York’s president at the time and helped organize the Drop YFS effort. “It got very nasty. Police were called. There were racist slurs.”

Students like Ferman don’t think it’s the student government’s role to take sides on political issues. “I think students have every right to speak up when they feel student dollars are promoting hate and a toxic atmosphere on campus,” says Ferman. Since the 1980s, student unions have been growing in power. They take money from undergraduates every year, which is charged separate from but alongside tuition, and they’re supposed to work for students. Some of that cash funds services, such as health and dental coverage, and student athletics. But much of it goes to advocacy and clubs students may find offensive. “They’d taken very controversial stances on what to fund in pro-life versus pro-choice issues, on Tamil issues going on in Sri Lanka. On every worldwide issue, they’d taken a position,” Ferman says of the YFS, which operates with a $2-million budget. They rarely take the position he would take.

The Canadian Federation of Students—an umbrella organization for student unions—has been heavily criticized for rash advocacy using student funds. The national organization, with its provincial subsidiaries, lobbies on behalf of 600,000 student members across Canada. These “members,” who automatically gain that status if their student union is a member organization, each pay $4.01 per semester to the CFS. In 2010, that came to $3.7 million in membership fee revenue—money used to fund the not-for-profit’s advocacy work. Students also pay an average of $4 per semester to be members of their provincial CFS. That’s before student union fees, which average out at around $30 per student, depending on the school. CFS national chairperson David Molenhuis acknowledges that some of the national campaigns, such as its current effort to fight the Canadian Blood Services’ decision to ban gay men from donating blood, are hot issues—but he doesn’t think they’re controversial. “They attempt to address head-on issues that perhaps college and university administrators don’t feel comfortable addressing,” he says. Some students also feel uncomfortable with their fees going to such politically sensitive issues.

For example, last June, the CFS wrote an open letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty joining the cry for a public inquiry into the “unprecedented curtailment of civil liberties” that took place at the G20. “The federation stands up for the rights of students to participate and to assemble publicly and to participate in demonstrations,” said the letter. “We defend the rights of students to mobilize in public, and the G20 is no exception.”

Some students at the University of Ottawa were upset to learn that not only does the CFS take a political stand on the G20, their own student union spent at least $1,000 to rent a coach bus to shuttle about 50 protesters to Toronto during the G20. Student Peter Flynn, who also heads up the University of Ottawa Campus Conservatives, blasted the expenditure as a “blatant misuse” of student fees. “I highly doubt that every single student who has to pay those fees would be happy to know their money was being spent to send a few individuals to protest for the weekend,” Flynn told the Ottawa Citizen.

York student Gregory Kay was also irked by his student union’s support for G20 protests. The YFS and the student union at the University of Toronto co-sponsored “Toronto vs. the G20: a teach-in.” Class included Black Bloc tactics, which ended up seeing storefronts and public property smashed during the summit in downtown Toronto. “That’s something most students don’t believe in at all,” says Kay, who is the business representative for the YFS board of directors. “Most students aren’t anti-capitalist. They’re not interested in civil disobedience.”

Of course, if students are unhappy with their student government, they aren’t doing much to change it. While voter turnout tends to be higher when contentious issues can be resolved with a ballot, the average voter turnout sits at between 25 and 30 per cent. Many students see student government as too divisive—or too inflexible—to even bother running. Ferman, for one, considered running for a seat on the executive in 2009, but couldn’t put his academic career on hold for a year as the bylaws dictate. He ran for—and won—a seat on the board of directors instead.

“It’s an interesting dichotomy—that the student president isn’t even a student,” he says. “There are lots of inherent problems with the organization, but the lack of flexibility is a major one.” In late August 2010, the university’s ombudsman released a report saying the student union’s electoral process needed a massive makeover, making recommendations Ferman believes might one day legitimize the organization. “Now the onus is on the student federation to take some of these recommendations to heart.”

Photo: Christinne Muschi/Reuters

Almost 700 Aboriginal students are enrolled at the University of Victoria

Increasingly it seems we must look to the University of Victoria for good ideas. This year’s Times Higher Education Supplement rankings put it sixth among Canadian universities and 130th in the world. UVic does well in our own rankings too, as you’ll see. Rankings were the first thing David Turpin, UVic’s president, wanted to talk about when he visited me in Ottawa last month. But his other story was more focused and may be more important: Victoria’s success in attracting, retaining and rewarding Aboriginal university students.

In 2006, only eight per cent of Canadians with Aboriginal ancestry had university degrees, compared with 23 per cent of non-Aboriginal Canadians. This is not merely too bad. There is a genuine economic and human cost, because the correlation between higher education and various social goods is exhaustively documented. Post-secondary education attainment is associated with better health, increased civic participation, lower crime rates, higher income, correspondingly higher tax payments, reduced dependence on social benefits, and more.

A February 2010 study by the Centre for the Study of Living Standards suggests that if the gap in educational attainment and labour-force participation between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians vanished by 2026, total tax revenue would increase by $3.5 billion and government spending could decrease by $14.2 billion. Obviously that won’t happen, but any progress in that direction helps. Never even mind the human benefits.

The best results I’ve seen in promoting access and achievement for Aboriginal students are from the University of Victoria. Some of this is a long-term trend. The university counted fewer than 100 Aboriginal students in 1999; today it’s nearly 700. The number of graduate students has grown from fewer than 10 to nearly 150.

Since 2005, UVic has been working on programs to solidify and extend those trends. With money from the Liberal-created, now-defunct Millennium Scholarship Foundation, the university came up with seven programs under a blanket name, the LE,NONET Project. (LE,NONET is pronounced “le-non-git.” It’s a Straits Salish word referring to success after enduring many hardships.) Most of the programs are for students. There’s a straightforward bursary program, which paid recipients an average of about $3,500 a year. There was also an “emergency relief fund.” Turpin told me some students were going home to their communities, say for a relative’s funeral, and not returning. Simply covering travel costs helped fix that, and at a cost lower than $600 per student per school year.

Finally, there were programs to keep the whole university experience from becoming too weird and foreign, for students who might be the first in their family to pursue higher education: a peer mentor program that matched young Aboriginal students with older Aboriginal students; a 200-hour internship with an Aboriginal community group outside the university gates; and a 200-hour research apprenticeship with a UVic faculty member. The project also included online counselling and workshops for staff and faculty members.

Did all this help Aboriginal students? They sure thought it did. Seventy-eight per cent thought the peer mentor program contributed to their success. Every other element of LE,NONET scored even higher. Almost 99 per cent liked the bursaries. Clear majorities said the program helped them feel connected both to the broader university community and to “who I am as an Aboriginal person.” Sometimes people suggest being a member of the First Nations and being at university are contradictory. Most LE,NONET participants disagree.

Bottom line: does all this fuss keep Aboriginal students in school? Participants in the program were less than one-third as likely to drop out as Aboriginal students who weren’t selected for the pilot program. They were more than twice as likely to continue from one year to the next. Graduation rates were significantly higher. It’s a safe bet that over their lifetimes those graduates will repay the extra investment many times over.

David Turpin says he’ll share details of the LE,NONET program with any university that’s interested. Many will be. Across the country, there’s been a recent and overdue emphasis on promoting access and success—getting students into university, and ensuring they get out with a degree—among under-represented groups. That includes Aboriginals, but also some immigrant populations and even, by some definitions, young men, who are entering university markedly less often than young women.

It should be obvious why this is all a good idea. An aging population needs higher productivity so a smaller workforce can pay for the benefits of ever more retirees. The needed human capital could come from immigrants, and a lot of it will. But it’s dumb to import brains when there are plenty of good minds right here that can succeed if only they’re given a fair chance and, yes, some extra help where appropriate.

Higher educational attainment needn’t make First Nations students feel forced to deny their identities. The skills and knowledge they acquire can go right to work in their home communities, or they can become part of a network that makes it that much easier for the next cohort of students to follow their example. It’s no coincidence that one of the country’s fastest-rising universities is the one that has pushed all these considerations to the top of its agenda.