All Posts Tagged With: "university"
College can add more earnings than university
Relative value varies by industry: study
Ever wondered whether an applied college degree or a traditional university degree will add more to your paycheque?
The answer depends on what industry you work in, according to a new study published by the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto. While university degrees generally offer a higher rate of return (as measured by increased earnings over people with only high school diplomas), there are some jobs where the college degree is worth more.
Not surprisingly, university rules in health care, senior management and in the legal field. In those industries, workers with university degrees make about 40 per cent more than those with no post-secondary credential, while college degrees bring only about 20 per cent more earning power.
But chefs and cooks, child-care workers and sales people who have college credentials have a roughly 20 per cent advantage over those with only high school, while those with university better their pay by only five to 10 per cent.
And in the trades, including construction and transportation, college credentials offer roughly a 20 per cent premium over high school alone while university adds only about five per cent.
What’s not considered in the study is the fact that there may be an advantage to earning a university degree and then adding a college credential. To read more about The College Advantage, click here.
10 things you must do during frosh week
You’ve moved into residence. Now what?
Photo courtesy of thepanamerican on Flickr
1. Go downtown. Then find your way back.
You’ll end up downtown at some point. You may not be sober the first time. Spend some daylight hours riding the bus along the essential routes, so that you can find your way back in the dark. Write down the numbers of the bus routes that take you to the entertainment areas and back. Find out when the last bus leaves from downtown for the school. Look for landmarks near stops. Store the info in your phone or on paper in your wallet.
2. Pick up a free agenda
Most student unions hand out free agendas with important dates already printed in them. If you loathe paper, get one anyway and transfer the dates into your web calendar or smartphone.
Five ways university is not like high school
Advice for first-year students from our resident professor
Photo courtesy of Tulane on Flickr
Ever heard the story about the university student whose paper was too long, so his professor tore off the extra pages and graded the remainder? It’s just an urban legend. But there are some big differences between high school and university that freshmen should prepare themselves for.
1. How you write matters. In high school, your teachers were likely happy if you wrote anything at all, and were probably ecstatic if you wrote something clear and gave an opinion or two. That won’t cut it at university. Professors expect essays to be formally structured and to provide analysis backed by evidence. They expect papers to be properly formatted, and they expect you to cite sources according to professional style guidelines. Dashing something off at the last minute — no matter how smart you are — won’t cut it.
Continue reading Five ways university is not like high school
Top 10 most (and least) expensive parking permits
Click to find out who charges $25 and who charges $1,000+
Photo courtesy of Canadian Starhawk on Flickr
Most students walk or take a bus to school, but some just need to have a car. For one, it makes grocery shopping much easier. It also tends to boost a student’s popularity at a time when it’s crucial to meet new friends. Oh, and it provides an easy way to visit mom and dad on the weekends. (If angling for a car, don’t forget to remind mom and dad about that important point.)
Whatever a student’s reason, bringing a car to school can be very expensive — especially in big cities. Or it can be suprisingly affordable, especially in Eastern Canada. It costs less to park for eight months at some maritime schools than it does to park for a weekend in Toronto.
That’s why we’ve decided to show you the Top 10 cheapest schools for parking passes, followed by the Top 10 most expensive.
Top 10 schools with the cheapest parking
1. Memorial University — $25
2. St. Thomas University — $75
3. University of Prince Edward Island — $82
4. University of New Brunswick — $94
5. Trent University — $99
6. Acadia University — $110
7. Algoma University — $121
8. Bishop’s University — $132
9. Lakehead University — $136
10. Brandon University — $145
Top 10 schools with the most expensive parking
1. Ryerson University — $1017
2. McGill University — $990
3. University of Toronto — $760
4. University of Ottawa — $744
5. University of British Columbia — $640
6. University of Calgary — $632
7. University of Winnipeg — $630
8. York University — $616
9. Queen’s University — $608
10. Université de Montréal — $546
This analysis is based on the lowest rate for an eight-month permit (or year-long permit where applicable) at 49 Canadian universities that are profiled in The Maclean’s Guide to Canadian Universities. Note that because these are the cheapest lots available to students, they may also be the first to sell-out. That’s right — it could cost even more to park.
This article originally stated that the lowest parking rate at the University of Regina was $640. That figure was incorrect. Maclean’s On Campus regrets the error.
Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course In Getting His Kid Into College
Book by Andrew Ferguson
If the purpose of art is to elicit an emotional response, then this is a book of intense artistry. The reaction from most Canadian parents who read it will be intense, hand-raising, thank-you-God relief they don’t have to participate in the madness that is the U.S. college application process.
Crazy U combines U.S. writer Andrew Ferguson’s first-person account of helping his son get into college with a behind-the-scenes investigation into the American university industry. It is a world of competition, conflict and confusions that can apparently only be solved by generous applications of cash.
Ferguson provides a brief history of the controversial SAT test, its opponents and the various prep courses that cling like remora to its underside. He visits with Kat Cohen, an independent college admission counsellor who charges $40,000 for her “platinum package” of advice on how to get into the school of your choice. As personal essays are now a major component of applications, and since these unfairly favour Type-A boasters, Ferguson finds a “model essay development service” that promises to turn every student into a mouthy extrovert. He spends $199 on an essay and finds “every sentence contained a little stink bomb of braggadocio.”
While fascinating in their own right, Ferguson’s experiences—thankfully—have limited applicability to Canada. Some Canadian schools do require personal essays. But aggressive competition for spots in top schools, driven by what Ferguson calls “that feral look of parental ambition,” is largely absent north of the border. For that we can thank the uniform quality of Canadian universities, a more civilized application process and our muted interest in the provenance of degrees.
Regardless of cross-border differences, however, Ferguson is a witty writer worth reading for his talent alone. Describing the university brochures sent to his son, he says they “were printed on paper so thick and voluptuous they might have been mistaken for the leaves of a rubber plant—you didn’t know whether to read them or slurp them like a giraffe.” There’s plenty to slurp here.
Now we don’t have to worry
Mom, dad, big brother and sister—everyone was scrimping to keep Jessica Holman in university. The Maclean’s $20,000 scholarship changed all that.
Jessica Holman almost didn’t apply to university. Once accepted, she almost didn’t go. Even after a successful first semester of social work at Carleton University, she often felt she should be working instead of studying. The thing constantly nagging at her? Money.
That’s why Holman started crying when a woman from Maclean’s told her that she’d won the $20,000 scholarship contest, which was part of our 20th Rankings Issue celebration. She was chosen at random from more than 27,000 entries. “Maclean’s didn’t know how badly my family needs the money, so it’s kind of astonishing that we were the ones who won,” says Holman. “Now we don’t have to worry about whether or not I can go back to school next year.”
When she says “we,” she means her entire family back in Oakville, Ont. Her mom, dad—even her older brother and sister—are all scrimping and saving to help her pay for school. Her experience is a good reminder of how much many Canadian families sacrifice to send their kids to university. All in, it now costs roughly $80,000 for a four-year undergraduate degree, according to TD Economics. For many families, it’s a struggle to put even one child through school.
Do-it-yourselfism
Cheap loans and tight job prospects create a new crop of entrepreneurs
After graduating from the University of Western Ontario in 2004, long-time friends Joe Facciolo and Skai Dalziel, both from Barrie, Ont., set off to travel the world. By the time they came home, in 2008, the job market had toughened considerably. “I was looking for work in alternative energy, but nothing really materialized,” says Dalziel, 30. Chatting about their travels, and how hard it was to find a good restaurant in a new city, the two friends were seized by a business idea. “We said, we’re young and we don’t have a lot of responsibility,” Dalziel says. “We figured it was a good time to give it a go.”
That fall, they moved to Whistler, B.C., where they knew the tourism market was strong. By November, Whistler Tasting Tours—which provides guided tours that visit some of Whistler’s best restaurants, providing a multi-course dinner in one evening—was born. “One of the biggest challenges was securing financing,” Dalziel says. “Banks weren’t interested in getting involved.” The Canadian Youth Business Foundation (CYBF), a charitable organization that works with entrepreneurs aged 18 to 34, gave them a $15,000 loan, and Whistler Tasting Tours was profitable within its first year; now they’re talking about branching out to other locations. Running a business, “you’re letting go of your social life,” he says. “But it’s really rewarding.”
Facciolo and Dalziel are two of countless twentysomethings who’ve avoided a more traditional career path, launching their own business instead of working for somebody else. Driven by a tight job market, the number of tools available online, and a growing sense of do-it-yourselfism, entrepreneurship is booming among students and recent grads. And with role models like Mark Zuckerberg, the 26-year-old billionaire founder of Facebook, they’re in good company.
Get me a job—or give me my money back
Should schools be in the business of turning out employable grads?
Carlie Deneiko is from the tiny town of Watrous, Sask. (population 1,800), more than an hour’s drive southeast of Saskatoon. As a teen, she dreamed of travelling the world, but her priorities are shifting. “I’ve got a boyfriend, and I’m really settled,” says Deneiko, 20, a student in the faculty of education at the University of Regina. “It’s becoming more important to me to get a job.”
Deneiko’s not too worried: her education comes with a job guarantee. She’s one of 355 students enrolled in a new program at the University of Regina that promises students they’ll land a job—in their chosen field—within six months of graduation. If they don’t, the university gives them another year of tuition for free. The UR Guarantee has other bells and whistles (like internships and work programs), but for Deneiko, it’s that extra year of free tuition that pulled her in. “If I don’t get a job, I’m coming back to get my special education certificate,” she says.
Since it launched in September, the UR Guarantee has been incredibly popular. Enrolment in the program, which is open to all first-year students, has already jumped by 24 per cent, says president Vianne Timmons. “We looked at students’ motivation for attending university,” she says, “and realized they’re looking at a degree primarily as a launching pad for a career.”
Universities have long been seen as ivory towers, leaving job training to colleges and vocational programs, but that’s changing fast. “It’s not the old, green college on the hill anymore,” says Lloyd Axworthy, president of the University of Winnipeg. “The marketplace has changed,” adds Ronald Bordessa, president of the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT). “Some universities have moved quickly. Others haven’t, and are having greater difficulty attracting students.”
Regina isn’t the only university in the job guarantee business—tiny Sainte-Anne in Church Point, N.S., offers its education and business graduates free tuition if they haven’t found work after four months. It’s a radical approach—but some schools don’t even track how many graduates go on to get jobs in their field. Monitoring this is “absolutely critical,” says University of Alberta president Indira Samarasekera. “If your students are not finding employment, it means that employers are not finding them competitive.” Even so, it’s hard to know which schools are turning out the most employable grads, which leaves some industry leaders shaking their heads. “Amazingly enough, [employability] is not the metric for success that universities follow,” says businessman Reza Satchu, who teaches the highly successful economics of entrepreneurship course at the University of Toronto.
Entrance stress
Do grade 12 students freak themselves out too easily?
Note: This post has been edited below.
Ditch the plan. Throw it in the dustbin, tie up the bag and take it to the curb. It’s not doing anyone any good.
It’s January. University applications for high school students are due next week. But the first round of acceptance letters have already gone out, so panic is settling in as the rat race kicks into high gear. High school students are now comparing letters, entrance scholarships and who was admitted where.
But the fact is this: Those who have done well to date are more likely to continue to do well. Those who have done poorly are less likely to get into university. And the statistics back it up.
The race has already been run – now it’s just a question of who gets to run the next leg.
In 2005, approximately 57,000 high school students were admitted to an Ontario university. Considering more than 328,000 high school students applied applications were received for university programs that same year, acceptance is anything but a given. In Ontario, students can apply to three schools for a flat rate of $120, and each additional school costs $40. The Globe and Mail reports that the average student submits 4.4 applications.
But that raises the real issue. Is it true that only 17 77 per cent of applicants are qualified to attend university? Or is it more likely that, despite the premier’s investment in post-secondary education there are still likely qualified students being turned away?
The situation is improving. Investments are being made. But for the time being, the annual high school panic session seems warranted.
Merit: the best and only way to decide who gets into university
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
One of the best parts of university is…
No more ‘uniformity’
There are lots of reasons why university is a million times better than high school. Never mind all the obvious ones, like the fact that the courses are way more interesting, or that you have more control over your marks. When I started my first year of university, a nice bonus that I didn’t expect: you don’t have to worry about what you’re wearing.
In high school, everyone wears a uniform. Sure, there are a couple variations of this “uniform.” And certain styles go in and out of popularity. But the High School Uniform is partly why distinguishing between two 15-year-olds is more difficult than making a Jurassic Park 4 with an original plot. Meaning, something that doesn’t involve a bunch of archaeologists wandering around a tropical island and getting eaten one by one, except for the main character wearing a fedora.
That’s why it’s kind of ironic when high school students get in an uproar about actual school uniforms. They’re all wearing the same thing, anyway.
Some people don’t wear the uniform, sometimes because they’re truly individuals, and sometimes because they’re completely oblivious and need their older sister to point out why wearing that sweater and those pants is a really, really bad idea.
University is completely different. When you’re sitting in a lecture hall with hundreds of students, nobody is paying any attention to you.
Or what you’re wearing.
-Photo courtesy of Jim.landover3
Want to save money on textbooks?
Loose-leaf is the way to go
Back in first year, I remember being shocked at how expensive university textbooks are. It seemed ridiculous to be paying hundreds of dollars for books that would be getting less than four months of use. And that I wouldn’t necessarily even enjoy reading.
In high school, textbooks are just something that your teacher uses to assign homework. It’s different in university. You spend hours with your textbooks every week, keeping up with readings, doing practice questions, finding quotes for an essay, or studying for an exam. They belong to you, and only you. You’ve known each other since the beginning, back when they were still covered in plastic wrap. It’s a special moment when you peel the plastic off and open a brand new textbook for the first time.
But it’s not a worth-hundreds-of-dollars kind of moment.
Buying textbooks second-hand is one common way to save money. Another solution: buying loose-leaf editions of textbooks. By sacrificing the spine and hard cover, I saved more than $70 on a loose-leaf edition of my biochemistry textbook this semester.
Buying a loose-leaf edition solves another textbook problem: instead of lugging around a 20-pound brick, I can remove all the pages I’m not using at the moment.
-photo courtesy of katerha
The dangers of living in residence
The sub-prime education crisis
Coming soon and you heard it here first
A friend of mine turned me on to a recent piece in the New Yorker on the state of higher education in America. The author is responding to the supposed crisis in the education sector and essentially debunking it. Now you’re welcome to review the article, written with the style and in the elevated prose that one would expect from such an esteemed publication, but the piece also rests on what I consider to be an unimaginably ignorant premise. The system must work, or so we should believe, simply because so many people are lining up for school. If the educational system were broken, people would presumably be opting out of it.
Now, bearing in mind that this article takes an American context, there’s already one huge problem. Many people are opting out of the public system down there. If one allows that education includes any kind of organized learning at all then sure, I suppose it’s easy to establish that lots of people are in favour of receiving that. But in America it is increasingly delivered by private or partly private institutions. So taking all forms of education and throwing them into one big pot only confirms one of the most basic facts about today’s modern society that everyone knew already. We all need to spend more time learning, and while we may have some choices over what and how we learn it’s hardly an option at all to simply opt out of education entirely.
More critically to the Canadian experience, this article also omits any real attempt to grapple with the ballooning cost of modern education and the resulting debt that often follows. And here is where I’ll introduce a concept that we all need to hear and think more about. It’s the idea of sub-prime education. Degrees that we are putting out on the market that are unlikely to pay off. Education that doesn’t actually create higher pay or better jobs or new opportunities. Sub-prime education.
The sub-prime mortgage crisis is often referenced but rarely understood. I’m not an economist but allow me to give a primer. American politics and American citizens bought widely and deeply into the narrative of home ownership. Home ownership was seen as the route to both private and public prosperity. So huge government programs were created to get as many people buying homes as possible and many citizens gladly mortgaged themselves to the hilt in order to buy as much property as they could possibly afford. And for a while it seemed to work. Unfortunately, many of the home loans put out there so that people could afford these mortgages were sub-prime. Prime is the rate at which a lending institution loans money to individuals it considers to be a good bet. Sub-prime is a higher rate, reflecting the fact that the lending institution considers the borrower to be a worse bet. Spread the risk over enough weak borrowers and the extra tax helps cover the occasional default. That’s the basic premise. It gets more complicated when banks start trading these loans and packaging them as investment vehicles, but that’s the basic premise.
What banks did not count on is that when the property market started to tank it created a cascade effect. Lack of faith caused the value of everyone’s investment to plummet. It’s a classic market bubble. When it bursts it drags everyone down. Only in the market you catch investors who, with adequately good sense, have protected themselves through diversification. When you catch homeowners you catch everyone. Ordinary people who put all their eggs in this one basket not because they are bad investors but simply because they bought into the narrative that home ownership is the route to prosperity. Time was that everyone believed that as an article of faith. No longer. But not until we had a whole lot of wreckage to teach us otherwise.
Now let’s look at education. In Canada, the floating rate of interest on the federal portion of a student loan is prime plus 2.5 per cent. That is, in the most literal terms imaginable, the very definition of “sub-prime.” Our government is publicly acknowledging that investment in education is a sub-prime lending risk. That doesn’t mean it never pays off. That doesn’t even mean it’s a bad bet for everyone. That just means that spread out over a wide sample group it simply isn’t a very good bet, on average. And private lending institutions aren’t even eager to participate at that rate. Contrast that with the rates that professional students can expect on their student loans if they go to private banks. For degrees in law and medicine — education that banks consider to be good bets — students can expect to access sizable loans at straight prime rate or at prime plus 0.5 per cent. That’s what it looks like when the market believes in the value of an investment.
Choosing your faculty dean
Up to the government, or the university?
In a case regarding equality rights at the University of Guelph dating back in 1990, the Supreme Court of Canada released a decision defending the autonomy of Canadian universities in the name of academic freedom. Essentially–the government declined to stick its nose in university affairs.
But now the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal is being asked to do just that. Will it follow the Supreme Court of Canada’s lead? So far, it doesn’t look that way.
Some guidance for international students?
As soon as I know what the CICIC does, you’ll know too
A couple of days ago I wrote a quick piece titled “No guidance for international students.” Shortly thereafter, Mr. Yves Beaudin, the National Coordinator for the Canadian Information Centre for International Credentials (CICIC), showed up to correct me. I sent him some mail to suggest an interview and he’s accepted. As soon as something can be arranged we’ll have the results.
Here’s what I know now. The CICIC is primarily focused on supporting the recognition and portability of qualifications and educational credentials. It seems to work both ways–helping Canadians to navigate foreign systems and helping those foreign to Canada to navigate our domestic systems. And for that reason alone I’m already happy to promote them. This is a real need for all concerned and has been the subject of considerable attention. Apparently CICIC was conceived as a response to Canada’s obligations under a UN Convention on the subject. If you really want to read up on that you can do so here.
What I don’t yet know, and what I’m eager to find out, is whether or not CICIC is the answer to the other problems I was initially writing about. Credential assessment and recognition, while very important, is only one challenge for international students. As for the rest of it? Well, the jury’s still out.
I will say this much. The CICIC and Mr. Yves Beaudin are fast on the draw when it comes to their email. And I wouldn’t fault them for solving just one piece of the puzzle while the rest remains, if that turns out to be the case. But I guess we’ll all know soon enough. In the meanwhile, for international students who can’t wait, you can contact them here.
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Questions are welcome at jeff.rybak@utoronto.ca. You can also follow me on Twitter.
No guidance for international students
Coming to Canada, you’re pretty much on your own
I recently received yet another email from a concerned international student looking to study at a Canadian school. The details don’t really matter, but suffice it to say that this student dug up a year-old article of mine from On Campus about a lawsuit happening at this school but unrelated to his proposed program, and wanted to know if he should reconsider. And oh yeah, could I recommend another program that might be better for his purposes — anywhere in North America.
I get this sort of mail fairly regularly. While I’m usually able to say at least something useful, I’m always stumped by just how little international students know about post-secondary education in Canada. To begin with, for example, this fellow was looking at a college program. Does he know and appreciate the difference between “college” in Canada and “college” in the U.S.? He was, at least, looking at a reputable public college. But quite often international students get sucked into the (largely unregulated) private career college system. Seeing the difference between the two systems, from half a world away, must be darn near impossible. And all of that is before we even start to talk about money questions, visa issues, professional licensing, etc. It’s frustrating for me when I get so many questions I can’t answer, or where I can only scratch the surface of these issues, but I can’t blame international students for mailing me. They have few enough options.
Often, when we talk about Canada’s obligations to our international students, we seem to speak in terms of sharing the opportunities we enjoy here, creating jobs and scholarships, expanding work visas, and so on. But the truth is that many international students really do just come here to get their education and intend to return home with it. They are pursuing foreign credentials for any number of reasons, but most of them would be recognizable to any Canadian student. It’s a way for those who can afford it to combine travel with school. It’s an opportunity to prove or to polish fluency in English. It may be a gateway to an international career. It could simply be a way to distinguish one’s credentials from out of the pack of job applicants when the day comes. But really, any of these reasons are very similar to why a Canadian student might choose to study in France rather than Toronto.
The challenge of accommodating these students in our system is more one of information than resources. The resourcing decision, for good or for ill, was made some time ago. Aside from whatever merit-based scholarships may exist for the top cut of students, international students are expected to bear the full cost of their education in Canada. In some cases they may even supply positive revenue (what we would otherwise call profit) for the schools that host them. And this is a point of contention for some people, but it seems what’s most important at this stage is to ensure that students who are investing very significant sums of money here at least have the opportunity to invest wisely. And here’s where we fail.
I will observe that some individual schools are doing a pretty good job with international student services. I want to compliment those efforts. The issue I’m talking about, however, occurs before students commit to an individual school, and when they’ve decided to study in Canada but aren’t sure where they should start. Before these students commit to a school there’s very little available in the way of help, and if they commit to the wrong school or act on bad information it may be too late afterward. And of course there’s always the fact that sometimes these students need to be warned away or protected from the schools themselves, and in these cases we can hardly rely on internal services to do that.
For a student coming over from South Asia (or equivalent) it may well be the case that any destination in the country (or on the continent!) is equally convenient. What that student wants is a good education with good opportunities to follow. And there is simply no centralized resource to which that student can turn for information. Anything to fill this void would be a serious undertaking — probably one requiring cooperation between the federal government and the governments of the various provinces and territories — but considering how much money comes into Canada each year from foreign study and how important these markets are to our international identity, I’d argue it’s an important investment to make. Not to say we need to be in the business of actively marketing ourselves to foreign students. The strength of our system seems to speak for itself. But once we’ve decided to accept their enrolment and their tuition, you’d think we’d offer them more in the way of guidance to ensure they leave Canada with good memories and a positive experience, rather than feeling like they’ve been duped, neglected, or simply ignored.
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Questions are welcome at jeff.rybak@utoronto.ca. You can also follow me on Twitter.
Photo: Getty Images
Don’t let first-year university get you down
You may think you’re the only one feeling miserable, says this expert. You aren’t.
Many kids arrive on campus only to find, “This is way harder than I thought,” writes Dr. David Leibow in a new advice book for first-year students called What to Do When College Is Not the Best Time of Your Life. Usually, it’s a case of thinking, “I’m having trouble keeping up with my work. I don’t feel really close to anyone. I can’t fall asleep, then I can’t get up.” You may be looking around, thinking, “Everyone else is having the time of their life,” writes Leibow, a psychiatrist with years of experience treating college kids at Columbia University’s student mental health centre.
First off, you’re not alone. “Many of your fellow students go to the student counselling service or to private psychiatrists; they just don’t tell you about it. Which is a shame. Because it’s hard not to feel abnormal when you don’t know what normal is. Of course, it would be helpful if people were more open about what they really felt and thought. But, since no one wants to appear weak or inadequate, it’s unlikely a wave of honesty will sweep your campus soon.”
Homesickness is normal and so is feeling embarrassed about it, he writes. If you’ve come from a good home it makes sense that you’d miss the “cozy world of home” no matter how thrilled you were to leave your parents. In a section called “Two steps forward, one step back,” Leibow writes that “All human desire is riddled with contradiction: I want to eat two pints of cookie-dough ice cream but I want to stay slim so I look good in jeans. I want to outscore my best friend on the LSAT, but I want to be a generous person and root for her success as well.” With homesickness, it’s: “I want to become an adult and become independent of my parents, but I want to continue to have them as a safety net.”
His best advice is: befriend an adult on campus. An adult’s company will help correct the maturity deficit that exists in dorms. “Forming a relationship with a friendly professor, dean, adviser or coach can help make you feel more at home.”
To cope with a heavy reading load, Leibow suggests pretending you’re reading for pleasure. Don’t take notes while you’re reading an assigned book. Take notes later from memory. He gives the example of picking up Anna Karenina to read for fun in the summer. “You would probably be able to read it without putting it down.” But if you were assigned it by your comp lit professor, “there’s a good chance you’d be nodding off after a couple of pages.” Why? “Because when you’re reading something you’ve been assigned, you feel you have to learn every fact, theme and argument.” It’s exhausting. “Reading for pleasure makes it possible for you to absorb the important themes and overarching ideas of the book organically.”
To overcome laziness, Leibow tells students to think like a workhorse, not a thoroughbred. “These similes capture an essential truth. Like thoroughbreds, lazy people are very temperamental. They’re finely tuned. When all the conditions are optimal, they can turn in a good performance. But if anything is off-kilter—how much sleep they’ve had, how hungry they are, how quiet the room is—lazy people won’t get out of the gate. Workhorses get moving as soon as they’re put in harness and they keep going until the day is done.”
Set a routine and stick to it, he tells students. If you’ve established a schedule of starting work every morning at 10 a.m., you won’t have to ask yourself, ‘Should I work?’ You’ll already be doing it.”
“Getting organized” is just a time-waster, and not the same thing as doing work, he warns. “Get organized before you go to bed, and get down to work first thing in the morning.”
In university, “insomnia is virtually universal.” To block out dorm noise, Leibow suggests using a noisy electric fan over a white-noise machine. “Some white-noise makers simulate the sound of rain, the ocean, or the jungle at night. These sounds are never accurate and can become irritating.” Once in bed, try to imagine that you’re sleeping in the arms of someone you love, he suggests. “Don’t let this fantasy make you feel depressed or lonely. One day there may be someone who sleeps with you every night. In the meantime, you might also try your blankie or a teddy bear.”
The decline of studying
How university students are spending less time hitting the books while earning better grades than ever
In 2006, Philip Babcock, a labour economist at the University of California, was surfing online when he came across a survey on the time use of undergraduate students at his school that shocked him. He noticed students were reporting perplexingly low studying times. Comparing his own university experience to his teaching experience over the past five years, Babcock had a gut feeling students weren’t studying as much, but remembers thinking, “people are always criticizing the generation that comes after them. Maybe they’re working their tails off.” So he decided to test the hypothesis. In the resulting study, to be published in the Review of Economics and Statistics later this year, Babcock and his co-author, Mindy Marks, found that since 1961, the amount of time an average undergraduate student spends studying has declined by 42 per cent, from 24 hours a week to 14. That drop is found within every demographic subgroup, within every faculty and at every type of college in the United States.
The study didn’t look at Canada, but the trend is true across North America. In his upcoming book, Lowering Higher Education: The Rise of Corporate Universities and the Fall of Liberal Education, James Côté, a sociology professor at the University of Western Ontario, analyzed a data set taken from 12,000 students from the U.S. and Canada and found similar results. Study times have gone down and grades have gone up, with the Canadian university average climbing from C to a B+/A- over the past 30 years.
Babcock’s study is one of the largest of its kind. The data of full-time students at four-year undergraduate programs was extracted from national surveys of thousands of people and represented four time periods: 1961, 1981, 1987-1989, and 2003-2005.
“The challenge was to make sure that we were comparing likes to likes,” says Babcock, who said it was complicated to account for demographic changes at the schools—more women, more working students—and to control for differently worded questions. In fact, women in recent cohorts were found to study on average more than men, and some faculties, like engineering, clocked more hours hitting the books than others.
As for the cause of the studying drop, he says the study only gives the hard numbers, but speculates the most plausible explanation is that university standards have fallen. He cites another of his studies, one on grade inflation to be released in the Journal Economic Inquiry later this year, to back up that claim. “The basic evidence is that instructors give higher grades, students work less and also students give them higher ratings,” says Babcock. “I don’t think there is much pressure to rein in the generous allocation of grading or to make sure that people make their courses difficult or demanding.”
Babcock is not the first to suggest that lower study times and grade inflation are linked. “When you look at grade inflation it’s a sign that we’re putting in less human capital, the standards have dropped and students are less engaged,” says Côté, who says disengaged students study less. “Most of the excuses for why we should tolerate disengagement don’t pan out,” he adds. “At best, work cuts into study time about two hours a week on average. That’s not an explanation for widespread disengagement.” He says that instead of studying, students have increased their leisure time and enjoy activities like sports, beer drinking, and parties.
But stats don’t tell the whole story, says Dean Giustini, reference librarian at the Biomedical Branch Library at the University of British Columbia. Having worked in the field for 15 years, Guistina says it’s impossible to demarcate what constitutes studying across the years, given that habits are changing all the time. “I remember talking with some of my professors, who said, ‘When we went to school we had to memorize 500 sources, and memorize the entire cataloguing rules from A to Z,’ ” he says. “Now there are so many different ways we can learn a subject. We don’t have to memorize.” Guistini says that in classrooms today you’ll be more likely to find a team-oriented, problem-based approach to learning as opposed to regurgitating facts and statistics. “More social forms of learning have taken the place of that model,” says Guistini. In other words, in the information age, the increasingly blurry line between studying and communicating may muddy the question of whether a student learns the material.
Ross Alger, an engineering student at the University of British Columbia, would say that squares with his own experience. “Every resource is at my fingertips,” says Alger. “If I have a physics problem I go to a website, I don’t have to spend hours going through a textbook trying to figure out something basic.” For the record, says Alger, even with the Internet, on top of his six-hour-a-day, five-days-a-week course load, he studies a minimum of two or three hours a night, and he says his classmates do more.
But Babcock says that if new technological tools have streamlined studying, it’s not by much: between 1988 and 2004, there was only a two-hour decline in study time. The greatest drop occured from 1961 to 1981, which was when professor ratings first came into vogue. That in turn motivated profs to grade easier, leading to falling standards, which Babcock argues led to a grade-inflation epidemic.
Instead of spending their time studying, Babcock and some of his fellow critics suggest students are finding other ways to produce better grades. Last year, Iris Franz, a visiting economics professor at Houston Baptist University, published a study that found students pester professors—obsessive emails, emotional crying, annoying visits to their offices—with more success than professors realize. “Professors don’t want to deal with students,” says Franz, “so they just inflate their grades so they can just close the door and do their research.” And now, it’s not just students that professors have to deal with. Tim Rahilly, associate VP of students at Simon Fraser University, says today’s students have “unprecedented levels of parental involvement.” Rahilly says that he often fields calls from parents and that increasing numbers of students are filling out privacy forms so parents can access their marks.
This trend dovetails with a system-wide push for universities to show results. Schools are on the hook to demonstrate better averages, as are teachers. Measurable ways to assess teachers have become the focus of a heated national debate about American public schools. This week, the Economic Policy Institute, an American think tank, released a report concluding that public school administrators rely too much on evaluations, and consequently “do a poor job of systematically developing and evaluating teachers.”
Calin Valsan, a finance professor at Bishop’s University in Lennoxville, Que., says universities face similar problems. In his 2008 study in the Journal of Economic Issues, Valsan says that since student-teacher evaluations were introduced in the 1960s, universities have used them to appear more like corporations with measurable results. Valsan says that the evaluations “were hijacked by university administrators” who were looking for hard numbers to quantify teaching as a marketable statistic to secure funding and as an easy way to assess profs. Valsan says that the evaluations are “central in universities for tenure and promotion” (albeit slightly less so for major research universities). “As a feedback mechanism they are fine, but as an administrative evaluating tool they aren’t,” says Valsan, who says the evaluations are manipulated on both sides.
Babcock says the evaluations create “perverse incentives” for instructors who aren’t rewarded for a rigorous curriculum, but are rewarded for maintaining a high class average. “A very fine communicator that grades very strictly may very well get a lower rating than a poor instructor that grades easy,” says Babcock. “I find it really disturbing.”
“It’s a classic game of prisoners’ dilemma, says Valsan. “Both students and professors make life easier for the other party.”
20% of older teenagers no longer in school
Canada stands out among OECD countries with young people not continuing education
A newly released study has found that one in five older Canadian teenagers were no longer pursuing a formal education in 2008. The 20 per cent rate among teenagers aged 15 to 19 in Canada was higher than the average of 15 per cent across the 31 countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
Statistics Canada reports the OECD proportion was down from 20 per cent in 1998, but it remained stable at 20 per cent in Canada. The agency says the proportion of teenagers aged 15 to 19 no longer in school varied from 14 per cent in New Brunswick to 26 in Alberta. The corresponding estimates for the territories ranged from 25 per cent to 34 per cent. StatsCan says employment and earnings prospects increase strongly with educational attainment.
In 2008, the employment rate for Canadians aged 25 to 64 who had not completed high school was 58 per cent, whereas the figure for college and university graduates was 83. Graduates from university programs earned considerably more — 75 per cent more on average — than high school or trade and vocational program graduates. According to the most recent data available, the college graduation rate in Canada, which includes only first-time graduates, was 26 per cent, well above the OECD average rate of 10 per cent.
The Canadian Press
