All Posts Tagged With: "university"
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
Going to university is not a sentence
Chances to really think about things are rare. Don’t waste those chances while you are in university.
It’s advice time again, and though I have doled out advice before, there is one big suggestion that will be helpful if taken to heart by everyone who goes to university, and has not, to my knowledge, been offered elsewhere. Here it is:
You are not in prison.
This might seem unhelpful since university, of course, is not prison, but my point is that a great many students treat it like it is. Put another way, many students treat their university years as thirty-six to forty-eight months that must be endured to get a degree. Do your time, keep your head down, stay out of trouble, and eventually they will let you out with a piece of paper saying that you deserve your freedom.
One problem with this approach is that it often fails. Students find that many courses actually require substantial effort and, sadly, some profs don’t give time off for good behaviour. After a year or two of this, they drop out or are kicked out, none the wiser and much poorer.
But the bigger problem with this approach is that even if it works, it represents a staggering missed opportunity. University is a time when you not only have the chance to learn about, read about, think about the most interesting questions in the world, you will actually be rewarded for it. If a professor asks you what you’re working on and you reply that you’ve been thinking a lot about St Augustine’s notions of evil as represented in Hamlet, your prof will think you’re a genius. Say the same thing to your sales manager in a few years and he will think you’re a nutcase. You may think that having to sit and read a book is about the worst thing you can be made to do, but believe me, there will come a day when you will be ecstatic if the most pressing thing you have to do in a day is sit and read.
You can approach university passively. You can get by with as little trouble as possible. You can just muddle through to get a credential.
But you will have missed the biggest opportunity of your life.
Your high school teachers are wrong
Five reasons why university is a happy place
For some unexplained reason, lots of high school teachers describe university as a scary place. Sometimes, after assigning a ridiculous amount of homework, they’ll say something like “I’m just getting you ready for university.”
Yeah, sure.
Why not have a bulldozer smash half your house off before a tornado strikes, just so you’ll be “more adjusted to it.” You know, in case it ever happens.
There is a lot of work in university, but here’s the part your high school teachers aren’t telling you: for a million different reasons, university is way better than high school.
Here’s the top five:
5) You set the pace
How much homework do you have in university? To a certain extent, it’s up to you.
On the first day of classes, most professors give out a detailed course syllabus. There’s a list of readings and study questions, which help prepare you for the midterm and the final. In some courses there aren’t any assignments, essays, or research papers- for the whole semester, you’re preparing for two major tests.
Yeah, I know that doesn’t sound like a good thing. It might seem a bit scary to have your entire mark resting on two tests, but it gives you a lot of study flexibility. In university, you’re given lots of tools to succeed: in addition to a detailed schedule of readings, you’re often given study questions and practice quizzes. When you’re preparing for a midterm or exam, you’ll know exactly what you need to do, and you’ll know when you’re ready.
This might sound extremely lame, but in university you’re given a formula for success. There are a certain number of steps you need to take- reading the textbook, doing the study questions, looking over the practice quizzes- and then you’re ready.
4) Bully teachers are a thing of the past
In high school, everything depends on your teacher. It doesn’t matter if you normally love a certain subject: if your grade 12 biology teacher is a bully who decided on the first day of class that she simply doesn’t like your face, or the way you exhale, you’re not going to enjoy biology very much that year.
In university, things are different.
Sure, there are lots of professors who are worth seeking out because of their enthusiasm and engaging teaching style, and there are some professors who should be avoided at all costs because they’re boring, or make it clear they’d rather be anywhere else but standing there in front of 500 first-years.
But unlike in high school, your professor doesn’t determine whether you love or hate school. You’re an anonymous student in a sea of hundreds and hundreds of first-years. It’s never personal.
3) University is a safe-haven for nerds
In university, there’s room for everybody. If you want to party, there are definitely plenty of opportunities available. But if you’d rather study and get good marks, nobody will hold it against you.
2) Four months of summer vacation
May, June, July, August. Seriously, I’m not kidding.
Sure, most of us have part-time jobs year round, and full-time jobs during the summer. But four months away from school is still four months away from school.
1) Three day week? Totally possible.
In high school, you don’t have much control over your schedule. Once you’ve filled in all the mandatory courses, you get to choose between visual arts and music.
University is completely different. Depending on your program, you still have a certain number of mandatory courses. But there’s even wiggle room when it comes to these core courses: you can often choose between a one-hour lecture three times a week, or a three-hour lecture once a week.
And the rest is completely up to you.
University gives you a chance to pursue your interests and passions, with a range of courses spanning dozens of subject areas.
Or, if you’re anything like me, you can score a three day week.
In my first year, I managed to cram all three of my labs and my physics, chemistry and biology courses into a Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule.
Of course, university is an opportunity to expand your horizons and challenge your ways of thinking. But why not expand your horizons while maintaining a three day week? Just something to think about.
And in later years, there’s always the possibility of a two day week…
-photo courtesy of dave_mcmt
What I did right
A “take” is the opposite of a mistake. Did you get that OED people?
In my last post, I urged new undergraduates to avoid some of the mistakes I made in my own undergraduate career. This post relates some of the strategies that served me well — takes, if you will –and should serve you well, too.
1. Study what you love. It sounds a bit trite, I know, but I really was one of those people who followed a dream. I had trouble settling on a major until I happened upon the English and Drama program at the University of Western Ontario where I was studying. By happy circumstance, I got to know some of the senior drama students and that year’s director-in-residence and knew I wanted to be one of them. Many people, no doubt, worried about what was going to become of me with such an artsy major, and my grandfather was recruited to gently urge me on the path towards high school teaching, but I knew that I was learning a lot and when the time came I would somehow end up in a career that let me do what I loved. And here I am. And no, being a professor is not like being a high school teacher, thankfully.
2. Find new, smart friends. In a comment on my previous post, a reader urged me to not to neglect the social aspect of university life, and I certainly agree that social interactions are a key part of the experience. But by “social interactions” I do not mean getting drunk and falling down a flight of stairs every weekend. A university undergraduate is one of the few people for whom it is not unforgivably obnoxious to question everyone about everything. Find people who want to talk about big ideas. Talk about religion, talk about politics. Talk about all the things that you won’t feel comfortable talking about when you are at an office cocktail party ten years later. Many of my ideas about ethics, government, law, and art took shape during raucous, impromptu debates with classmates, roommates, friends — even strangers. For those of you attending your small, local universities, try to find some friends that you weren’t friends with in high school — you’ll be amazed at what other people think.
3. Never underestimate the value of thirty minutes. My roommate and I had a regular TV schedule that had us watching one show from 7:00 to 8:00 and something else at 8:30 (kids, “TV” was a kind of internet that you couldn’t control). In the interval, I would go upstairs and do homework for half an hour. My roommate marveled at this, partly in admiration at my discipline, and partly in incredulity that I thought I could get anything worthwhile done in half an hour. In fact, you can get a lot done in half an hour. You can read a chapter of a textbook, proofread the draft of a short paper, organize your schedule for the coming week. And, in practice, an undergraduate often has a half an hour here and there between classes, before the bus comes, and so on. But I think a lot of people assume that if you only have half an hour, there’s no point in getting to work. Wrong. Find something you can do, and do it. An extra half an hour a day is an extra 84 hours in an academic year, not counting exam periods. That’s more time than all the classes in a full-year course.
Are college towns havens for hate?
Canada’s biggest hate-crime capitals are three Ontario university towns
For many, it may come as a shock to find out that Canada’s biggest hate-crime capitals are three Ontario university towns. Kingston, London and Guelph boast the country’s highest rates of police-reported hate crimes, according to Statistics Canada.
But Barbara Perry, a professor and associate dean of social sciences at the University of Ontario Technical Institute in Oshawa, Ont., isn’t that surprised. All three populations have traditionally been homogeneous—white, Christian and English-speaking. And, says Perry, “like many other communities, they’re experiencing a lot of fairly rapid demographic change. These sorts of relatively small cities are struggling to come to grips with these shifts.” Guelph and London tied for first at 8.2 hate crimes per 100,000 citizens in 2008. And Kingston followed with a rate of 7.7 per 100,000. (Among Canada’s 10 biggest cities, Vancouver and Hamilton ranked the highest with a rate of 6.3 per 100,000.)
The presence of post-secondary schools, says Perry, can be a double-edged sword. Although those in university and college towns are likely to be better educated, roughly six out of 10 people charged with hate crimes were between the ages of 12 to 22. “Perhaps the victims themselves are more aware of their rights,” says Perry, “but I also think more youth means more offending.”
Since hate-crimes, which can include crimes motivated by race, religion or sexual orientation, are generally underreported, some experts see a silver lining in a city’s higher rates. Perry says it may have something to do with a greater awareness among citizens. Or, she says, perhaps the police are better trained and more perpetrators are being brought to justice.
Your grades will drop
How universities and high schools are setting students up for disappointment
Scott Penner was a model high school student. With a grade 12 average of 93 per cent, and with math and science as his strongest subjects, he was poised to be a successful engineering student. That is, until he started at the University of Manitoba. Penner was not expecting to glide through university, though he “was still expecting to do fairly well.” Even by these lowered standards, his first year was less than encouraging. Not only was he receiving an uncharacteristic assortment of Bs and Cs, he failed first-year calculus, a prerequisite to continue on in engineering. “It was a bit of a shock,” he says.
Penner is not alone. The vast majority of students see their grades fall, often dramatically, once they get to university. What is sometimes called “grade shock” can have devastating consequences for students, as they struggle to cope with the fact that they are no longer at the top of the class.
Within the course of a semester dreams can be easily whisked away. “The business program or engineering program that they thought they were going to pursue [is] not an option for them anymore,” says Brock University economist Felice Martinello who recently co-authored a study on the changes in grades between high school and first-year university.
There are also financial repercussions. In 2008, Maclean’s surveyed the rate at which students who received entrance scholarships kept the requisite grades to maintain their funding going into second year. At York University, where fully 60 per cent of incoming students received an entrance scholarship, only 10 per cent kept their funding. At McMaster the rate was 21 per cent. At Ryerson, seven per cent.
As grades have long been known to predict whether students will complete their program, significant grade drops may be contributing to dropout rates, suggesting that students coming in, even with an A+ average, may become discouraged and simply give up. In fact, the best evidence we have suggests that it is the highest achieving students that are most at risk for being disappointed in university.
In his paper, Martinello, and coauthor Ross Finnie, find–consistent with previous research–that on average students see a 10-point drop in their grades once they are in university. Using data from Statistics Canada’s Youth In Transition Survey, the study concludes that nearly half of all students surveyed saw their marks decline by one letter grade. About 23 per cent saw their grades plummet by two letters or more. Only 2.5 per cent of students saw their grades improve, and about a quarter maintained averages consistent with their high school marks.
But, what is novel about Finnie and Martinello’s paper, and pertinent for high school academic stars like Penner, is that the economists determined that “the highest achieving group (in high school) has the largest decrease in grades.” Students entering university with a 90 per cent or higher experienced a drop of 11.9 points. Students with high school marks in the 60-79 per cent range had only a 4.4-point drop. Prior studies tended to assume that even with a drop, that there was a linear relationship between high school and university grades. Finnie and Martinello’s research challenges that assumption.
“You’d think that maybe, oh, it’s the weaker students, that once they go to university, they’re really going to get killed, but it turns out that’s it’s the 90 plus group,” Martinello says.
Recent trends suggest that the challenges of grade shock are only going to become more widespread. That’s because students with average entering grades, in the B or B+ range, are slowly disappearing. And when all, or most, of the students come in with an A or A+ average, many will have nowhere to go but down.
At the University of British Columbia average entrance grades across the university are expected to be 87 per cent this year, a two per cent increase from last year, and up from 80 per cent ten years ago, and 70 per cent twenty years ago. Andrew Arida, UBC’s associate director of enrolment says higher entering grades are simply a matter of supply and demand. “Because students are presenting higher grades, we’ve had to raise our admission averages to avoid over-enrolling,” he explains.
Only a few years ago, UBC was admitting around 15 per cent of students with grades below 80. That number is dwindling fast. Although Arida didn’t have final figures for the fall, he says only a “small number” of students will get in with less than an A. Students entering the two largest faculties, science and arts, will need a minimum high school average of 86 and 85 per cent respectively.
Similarly, the University of Waterloo increased by seven per cent this year over last, the number of entering students with an average of at least 85 per cent.
Schools like Waterloo and UBC, already considered prestigious, are joining an elite club of universities that are inaccessible to all but the highest achieving students. With an average entering grade of 88.9 per cent, Queen’s University rarely admits students with less than an A average. At McGill, the median average entrance grade for Canadian students is 92 per cent.
A University of Red Deer?
School divisions meet to discuss options for bringing a university to Central Alberta
Red Deer school boards met last week to discuss the possibility of bringing a university to the Central Albertan city. Sixteen representatives from the community and area school divisions were present at the gathering which was hosted by the Red Deer Public Schools district.
At a population of more than 90,000, Red Deer is the largest urban centre in Western Canada without a university. For example, Brandon Manitoba with a population of around 46,000, has a university. “Red Deer’s young people, it would appear, are disadvantaged when compared with their peers in communities of similar size across Canada,” superintendent Don Falk, told the Red Deere Advocate.
According to Falk, the limited programs offered by Red Deer College means students have to leave the city, and incur costs they might otherwise have avoided, in order to pursue a higher education. “For many, the opportunities at RDC are limited to a partial program that must be completed elsewhere,” he said. The gathering, intended to pursue possible strategies for bringing a university to the city, was largely preliminary in nature and the Red Deer Public Schools district has yet to release a post-meeting statement.
School’s out
Time for catching up
Sleeping-in during summer vacation isn’t as much of a novelty as it used to be. The thing is, if you plan your class schedule right, you should be able to sleep in during the school year, too.
In university, the best part of summer vacation is being able to procrastinate guilt-free.
Now my friends and I have time for profound conversations. Like the merits of Modern Warfare versus Sniper: Ghost Warrior, which will only cost 40 bucks when it’s released next month. Modern Warfare might have AC-130s and airstrikes, but Ghost Warrior has realistic sniping missions.
With labs, essays and exams to worry about, it’s easy to lose touch with the rest of the world. And in the space of two semesters, everything changes. Sometime between last September and my final exams, everybody stopped playing Halo 3. And according to my 14-year-old brother, World of Warcraft is lame-ass.
I have some catching up to do.
-photo courtesy of Mike Willis
Living on social assistance
Looking back at the “OSAP diet” campaign
Some time ago I wrote a couple of pieces about OUSA‘s campaign revolving around the so-called OSAP Diet. The idea was to draw attention to the fact that post-secondary students, living on OSAP, are budgeted at $225/month for food, or $7.50 a day. I’ll draw your attention to the older stories if you want to catch up, but suffice it to say that a lot of the debate revolves around whether or not students should reasonably be expected to cook their own meals and pack lunches for themselves, and whether or not a daily Starbucks “coffee” (read $5 frappasomething) constitutes a necessary food expense.
Related: The OSAP diet and the student lifestyle
Related: Budgeting for the real world
Now I’m all for giving students a livable budget for their studies, and we can debate back and forth just what that budget should be, but I was underwhelmed then and I remain incredibly skeptical now about the verbiage thrown around in context of this campaign. Students continually referred to this as “poverty” (for which no official definition exists in Canada, by the way) and suggested it was simply impossible to eat healthily on this budget. I won’t put further words in the mouths of the OUSA campaigners, however, and if you’d like to view the results of their experiment you can do so here.
My major issue, all along, is that comparisons to poverty and even starvation are rather apoplectic when welfare recipients in Ontario (excuse me, “public assistance”) receive so much less. If students imagine that they are starving on $225 a month, you’d expect those on welfare to be literally dropping dead. And in fact the reality isn’t far short of that. If OSAP represents a diet then welfare is a real famine. It isn’t so much that I resent students for their campaign for more funds as I’m rather embarrassed when it ignores such a terrible and inevitable contrast. It suggests, much as I hate to admit it, that students are fine with our most vulnerable starving just as long as they can avoid packing their meals for school.
Anyway, I was reminded of this again when the Star (which is rapidly becoming Canada’s best investigative newspaper) ran a similar experiment. In context of The Stop’s “Do The Math” Campaign the Star asked some prominent Torontoians to try living on a true welfare diet. The results were very much like what OUSA wishes it could demonstrate about the OSAP situation. We’re talking about true, desperate poverty now–visits to the food bank, reliance on public agencies, excitement at receiving a doggie bag to take home following a free lunch. The article made me cringe. Now we’re not talking about students who simply fail at cooking their own meals. We’re talking about very competent adults using every tool they have, and still struggling.
Most affecting in this story was an observation from Catherine Mihevc, Councillor Joe Mihevc‘s 11 year-old daughter, and which pretty much secured my lifetime support of his political career. Their entire family participated in the challenge, and she said that she and her sister were rarely hungry because their parents let them eat first. For me that’s a part of my immediate family history. My grandparents were refugees and their children always ate first too, when things were bad. As the children got older they knew to leave enough for their mother, because otherwise she simply wouldn’t eat. And this is what true poverty looks like. These are the strategies that it teaches.
I hate to ever set one group’s claims in direct competition with another’s. There is no reason why adequate funding for post-secondary studies needs to come at the expense of livable public assistance, or vice versa. But I do wish OUSA could have adopted a wider view on this issue, because the OSAP Diet campaign unavoidably trivializes the real problems that some people experience in simply feeding themselves and their children. It locates the needs of those who rely on public assistance outside of any operative definition of human norms. And really, that is exactly the problem with the system as is stands. No one is even trying to be realistic. Welfare is viewed as a punishment, not as an adequate amount of money to subsist on. And that has got to change.
Anyway, it’s something to think about the next time you stop at Starbucks. Or perhaps even before you do.
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Questions are welcome at jeff.rybak@utoronto.ca. You can also follow me on Twitter.
Ann Coulter and student reactionaries
She’s relevant because we are making her relevant
Until this week I knew very little about Ann Coulter and I liked it that way. I was vaguely aware of her as a deliberately provocative, talking-head right-winger. I had the sense that she was good at antagonizing people. That was about it. I had about as much interest in following her “work” as I do in Rush Limbauch’s oeuvre.
This week I can’t hide from her. She’s everywhere. Elections just ended at U of T with the usual accusations and counter-accusations, students at UTSC just approved an unprecedented and massive levy to fund a world-class athletics facility for use in the 2015 Pan-Am Games, wrestling continues unabated over the fate and status of First Nations University of Canada, and all I can bloody well hear about is this screwball American provocateur who has just about nothing relevant to say to Canadians and nothing informed to say to anyone. Someone please tell me why I’m supposed to care?
The freedom of expression angle I get. It’s important to pause once in a while to reflect on the importance of free speech and also on the occasional limits necessarily imposed on it. But honestly, can’t we have that debate in context of someone who is at least relevant? Ezra Levant is a home-grown topic of debate, speaking to and about Canadian issues. Ann Coulter is just a traveling gong show promoting nothing other than her own celebrity. And we let her! We even help her! Every line I’m writing this very moment gives her more of the commodity she’s so successfully selling — her own profile. She doesn’t care if we like her or what we say about her just as long as we keep listening and paying attention. And we sure are doing that.
The fact that this is playing out on our university campuses is no coincidence. Students make fantastic reactionaries. There’s a whole lot of good intentions there but not a lot of direction. So with very little of their own to say, student activists simply argue about what someone else is saying. Coulter opens her mouth and gets the whole thing rolling for us. She says something outrageous, some students argue she shouldn’t be allowed to say it, others defend her right to say it, and all of a sudden that’s the whole debate. Students aren’t saying anything at all–or at least nothing of their own. They’re just arguing over what Coulter said. And that’s just sad.
Maybe I’m bitter because the spat of Ann Coulter articles here are the biggest thing for On Campus in ages. Even the strike at York didn’t attract this much attention or this many comments. Students do have a lot of power and can set the agenda for discussion of post-secondary issues if they want to. But taking on real and complex topics is difficult. Getting all outraged about Coulter–or alternatively, getting all outraged over the suppression of Coulter–is easy. And as long as we keep getting distracted by every circus sideshow that comes to campus, it’s going to remain that much harder to bring attention to the real issues affecting post-secondary students in Canada today.
But hey, in the spirit of giving everyone what they want, here’s a video of Coulter saying outrageous things. Enjoy.
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Questions are welcome at jeff.rybak@utoronto.ca. You can also follow me on Twitter.
Why do professors hate Wikipedia so much?
They have history.
Why pay your student reps?
Because really, it’s a worthwhile investment
For those in the Toronto area, city councillor Rob Ford is revving up for a probable campaign for mayor. This wouldn’t be especially relevant to student politics, save that Ford’s attitude towards budgeting and reasonable expenses in fulfilling his role as a city councilor has always struck me as symptomatic of a problem in student organizations. Ford is a cost-cutter and a penny-pincher. This is his major claim to fame and the source of his popular appeal. He’s against office budgets and funds used to communicate with constituents and he thinks everyone gets paid too much to run the city. And I’ve got to admit, any time I see money spent in stupid ways or on stupid things or paid to stupid people I feel the tug of his message too. But then I remember where it’s coming from.
Ford, you see, is quite independently well off. Rather than spend taxpayers’ money he’d prefer to spend his own. That’s how he funds events in his riding, and how his official office budget each year is $0, and how he can afford to suggest that everyone running Toronto (including himself) is overpaid. He doesn’t need the money. And while his public spirit is admirable, and sometimes I even like him despite my disagreement with his politics, I also have to wonder where it would lead us if we follow that attitude towards its logical conclusion.
When folks look at students’ unions and see people getting paid to represent their peers they often wonder how it can be justified. This sometimes applies to the student press as well, and other organizations where students may be paid to varying degrees. One common reaction is to think “if they really cared about doing the job, they’d do it for free.” Some even think “hey, I’m willing to do it for free — why would anyone want them instead?” And while these ideas are commendable, in a Rob Ford kind of way, they do circumvent an important question. Who can afford to simply volunteer and to do these jobs for free? Or more importantly — who cannot afford to?
Some positions on campus represent very significant commitments of time and energy. It’s not uncommon for these positions to simply require a reduced course load — either formally in the by-laws of the organization in question or informally due to the demands of the job. And again, while there’s some justice to the notion that these roles are assumed voluntarily and anyone who goes in with their eyes open should be prepared for the demands, this notion necessarily suggests that a certain kind of person need not apply. So the students who are poor and can’t afford to volunteer dozens of hours each week, or cannot possibly afford to extend the duration of their studies without some compensation, they are effectively barred from the jobs entirely. And is that what we want?
Here is where I think there’s a special onus on representative organizations to ensure that it’s possible for anyone (or at least most people) to represent their peers. Much as I may applaud some of Rob Ford’s sentiments, his politics essentially imply that city council should be run by independently wealthy individuals who can afford to pay their own costs and fund their own activities. And this is not representative democracy in any real sense. It can only lead to skewed politics and bad outcomes. Government by the wealthy inevitably becomes government for the wealthy.
Now in a student context, there are obviously two important limits. First, some student groups simply can’t compensate their representatives adequately and so must run on volunteerism. If there’s simply no other choice then so be it — you do what you’ve got to do. Second, there’s no reason that students need to be paid well for their commitments — only adequately. And yes, I have seen some student organizations where executive compensation seems to have got out of control. This too can lead to unfortunate outcomes, so really it’s all about striking a balance.
When there are competing demands for every dollar in an organization — and this is inevitably the case because there’s never enough money — it’s easy to wonder why we’d bother paying students or funding their commitments. But in fact it’s one of the best investments that any organization can make. If the people who run your organization and who represent students are not themselves typical students then your entire mission is skewed. It undermines everything you are hoping to accomplish. There will always be examples of money that isn’t spent well or of people who don’t earn what they’re paid. And it’s useful to have someone around who will keep an eye out for that, even if it’s a Rob Ford type. But that attitude cannot be allowed to deflect the entire mission of a student organization, which is to represent real students. And students, typically, cannot afford to take on full-time jobs for free.
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Questions are welcome at jeff.rybak@utoronto.ca. You can also follow me on Twitter.
Budgeting for the real world
The OSAP Diet experiment yields results already
My last piece was a response to the “OSAP Diet” experiment, as undertaken by the OUSA. On first pass I was underwhelmed by the idea. Living on $7.50/day for food doesn’t seem too radical to me. But unexpectedly I find the project has become very interesting. It’s demonstrating that students are shockingly ignorant about budgeting, food costs, and the world as it appears to anyone paying their own bills.
The Varsity ran a piece in their current issue, taking students’ reactions to the campaign. I’d love to link directly to the article in the paper but I think this content doesn’t make it to their website. If anyone can find it, somewhere, please let me know. In the meanwhile, I’ll simply say that six students at random were stopped on campus and questioned on the topic, including their own budgets and spending habits. The article comes with first names and photos, but I’ll omit them for now. Let’s just say I’m protecting the ludicrous. Their comments are as follows:
- “I think it’s hard for students living on $7.50 a day to actually get things done. It adds to the stress of trying to live day to day. I’d spend about $20 a day, or try to anyway.”
- “I don’t think it’s enough at all. If I were living alone, I think I’d spend over $20 a day on food. I mean, just one coffee is $5, and that’s almost the entire OSAP allowance.”
- “I’d say I spend about $15 a day, not including alcohol, but that changes during exam time due to time constraints. I certainly couldn’t live on $7.50 a day.”
- “A meal itself is $5-10, so I’d say I spend $30-40 a day. If they can do it, good for them–if they’re not thin and gaunt by the end, that is.”
- “I’d say I spend at least $15, and I cook a lot, so that’s not even eating out. Good food costs more than junk food, too.”
- “That’s definitely way too low for food. It’s possible, but a bit of a stretch. I probably spend about $15 a day.”
This is a sample group of six. Probably not enough to draw elaborate conclusions from. But I’ll make some preliminary observations and then I’ll suggest that I’d love to learn more and in fact I think this experiment could have wide implications for our approach to education.
First, we’ve got the $5 coffee again. Someone needs to find whoever it is at Starbucks who managed to redefine their elaborate concoctions as reasonable daily beverage purchases and give that person an award. But leaving aside the one rhetorical point, many students seem to classify daily retail food purchases as part of a standard, baseline budget. Some simply assume that every meal must cost whatever a restaurant is charging. The difference between eating on a budget and splurging on a meal is, apparently, the distinction between MacDonald’s and sushi. And that’s just insane.
Second, most students fail at cooking and have no sense at all of how to shop. For the ones who live at home with parents this may be considered normal, perhaps. But even so, you might expect they’d know the difference between grocery shopping on a budget and not. I hate to sound like an old guy here, grumbling stupidly about “kids today,” but when I was a kid my mother took me grocery shopping. And she showed me how to find cheaper stuff and things on sale. Hell, we even bought dented cans sometimes. I’m not saying every student needs to go that far and in fact we often didn’t. But at least I learned the difference.
2010 Student Surveys: Complete results
In two major surveys, students get the chance to grade their own universities.
There are many ways by which a university can measure its performance, including asking those on the receiving end of an education—the students—what they think. In recent years, a growing number of universities have been doing exactly that. The following pages contain results from two major student surveys: the National Survey of Student Engagement and the Canadian University Survey Consortium—NSSE and CUSC for short. Between them, these surveys examine how involved students are in various academic and extracurricular activities, how satisfied they are with their university and its faculty, and how connected they feel to their school.
Want to know what universities are doing to improve the student experience? Click here.
The findings show that while students are generally happy with their university education, there are key areas of discontent. In particular, a significant number of students feel they don’t fit in at their university, more often in the larger schools than the smaller ones.
Commissioned by the universities, the surveys ask more than 150 questions about the undergraduate experience—inside the classroom and beyond. The answers help each university assess the quality of its programs and services, which in turn can aid in the design and implementation of strategies to improve areas as indicated.
Recognizing that this data can also be useful for prospective students trying to decide which university is right for them, Maclean’s has been publishing CUSC and NSSE results each year since 2006. They provide direct feedback from students on the quality of their education and their general level of satisfaction.
The U.S.-based NSSE began in 1999 and is distributed to first- and senior-year students. Administered by the Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research, NSSE is not primarily a student satisfaction survey. Rather, it is a study of best educational practices and an assessment of the degree to which each university follows those practices. The survey pinpoints what students are doing while they are in school and on campus.
Research has shown that various forms of engagement are likely to lead to more learning and greater student success. And this link exists not only in the more obvious areas of academic endeavour, such as the number of books read and papers written, but also in curricular extras such as conducting research with a faculty member, community service, internships and studying abroad, as well as in extracurricular involvement with other students.
Applying knowledge
A student survey helps universities target areas for improvement.
Anne Celine Hansen, a fourth-year bachelor of management student at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus, used to find herself stuck between classes killing time. “I wouldn’t really know what to do with myself,” she says. Hansen, who lives about a 20-minute walk from campus, could study at the library or sit in the cafeteria, but it was hard to connect with other people. Like many students living off-campus, she felt disconnected from the pulse of her university. “Students would take the bus up to campus, go to class and then take the bus back home,” says Hansen.
In 2006, UBC started administering the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), a U.S.-based survey that indirectly measures educational quality by analyzing what students do with their time on campus. NSSE measures a university’s performance based on five key benchmarks—including student-faculty interaction, level of academic challenge and supportive campus environment—providing data for comparison across time and between institutions. Research has shown that higher levels of engagement can lead to greater student success. UBC’s results pointed to the disengagement that Hansen and others at Okanagan were feeling, so in 2008, the school decided to correct the problem. “We wanted to make sure that our commuter students had exactly the same campus life experience as the residence students, the same level of TLC,” says Ian Cull, associate vice-president of students at the Okanagan campus.
The school set up what it calls “collegia”—on-campus lounges providing space for commuter students to sit and do homework, talk, or just watch TV. They’re staffed by senior students, called collegia assistants, who answer questions, provide information about the university and set up social events. Hansen has been working as a collegia assistant since the program started. Students “are always coming in and talking to people, meeting people,” she says. “It becomes a big group.”
The issue of student engagement is becoming increasingly important for universities, especially since NSSE arrived at 11 Canadian schools in 2004. The survey has now been conducted at 64 institutions across Canada, with 11 more universities and one college set to participate for the first time this year. And as the years of data accumulate, schools are using the insight NSSE provides to create programs tailored to improving the quality of their students’ education.
Administrators at the University of New Brunswick had little cash to spend on new programs, but they didn’t want to waste their NSSE data. So Tony Secco, UNB’s vice-president, academic, had the information broken down by faculty and distributed to the deans. Deciding to concentrate primarily on one benchmark—student-faculty interaction—they pooled ideas and came up with several low-cost ways to better connect professors with their pupils. The administration hosted student-faculty mixers, held faculty workshops on student engagement, asked professors to spend more time mentoring after class, and converted unused space on campus into common and student services rooms where faculty and students can meet. While there are no hard data yet on how well the initiatives are working, the response from students and teachers has been positive. “Engagement in any exercise is very strongly linked to the fulfillment that is sensed by the individual,” says Secco. For his part, UNB president Eddy Campbell observes: “NSSE is a good instrument for measuring that engagement. And it allows us a good look at the places where we need to do better.”
But NSSE isn’t just supposed to be used internally. Its results are meant to be shared across schools, and are most effective when broken down into faculties and student groups. Unfortunately, this isn’t an easy process. “There’s no formal mechanism for sharing information across institutions,” says Chris Conway, principal investigator for the NSSE intervention project—a group, funded by the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario, that examines NSSE’s effectiveness. He says Canada needs “a more systematic data sharing and analysis exercise” that breaks down information by school and then by faculty, making cross-institutional comparisons easy. Conway and a committee of educators from around the country are working to create a national data-sharing initiative that will do exactly that. So far, 44 universities have signed on to the project, and Conway is hoping to release preliminary results within four months.
Conway is cautious, however, not to draw conclusions prematurely, noting that although NSSE has built a good foundation of knowledge in Canada, the programs it’s helped to create are still in their infancy, and universities won’t know how effective they are without a few more years of data. “I don’t think we’re at the point now where we can say a given type of experience gives you the best bang for your buck in terms of quality improvement,” he says.
Still, Jillian Kinzie, the NSSE institute’s associate director, is optimistic, pointing out that Canadian schools are continually improving their scores and bettering their educational programs. “The thing that impresses me the most is the commitment to action,” she says. “Digging in and really spending time thinking about what these results tell us about the quality of students’ educational experiences, that’s the most important part—converting the results into some sort of action to improve the educational experience.”
2010 University Student Surveys: web-exclusive charts
Students tell what they really think about their university, from the quality of their profs to whether they feel they get the runaround.
Here you will find additional results from the Canadian University Survey Consortium (CUSC). The CUSC survey, which was commissioned by the universities, asks more than 100 questions about specific aspects of the undergraduate experience—inside the classroom and beyond—designed to provide universities with data to help them assess programs and services.
Each year, the survey targets one of three student populations: first-year students, graduating students and all undergrads. In 2009, 34 campuses took part, administering an online questionnaire to a random sample of approximately 1,000 graduating students at each university. Institutions with fewer than 1,000 graduating students surveyed them all. In total, more than 12,000 students took part for an overall response rate of 45 per cent.
Each chart lists the universities in descending order of achievement. Responses are ordered according to the percentage of survey participants who chose the highest level of satisfaction (e.g., “very satisfied”).
Complete 2010 University Student Survey results available here.
Getting the most out of your professor
Professors dish on how students can learn more from them outside of the classroom
There is one person in your lecture theatre who is a little different from everyone else. No, I’m not talking about that guy who never bathes, who whispers to himself as he takes notes, and who seems completely unaware that his nose whistles every time he exhales.
I’m talking about the one standing up at the front of the room, talking; the one who everyone who isn’t playing with their computer or phone is watching: your prof.
I’m sure that your prof seems like a lofty intellectual who is much too clever, important and busy to want to talk to the likes of you, but I’ve got news for you: your prof is a human being, and it gets lonely up there at the front of the room when you’ve spent an hour talking and nobody has asked a single question or given any other indication they’ve understood a word you’ve said.
Educating you and making sure that you understand the course material is part of your prof’s job, and talking directly to your prof can make a world of difference to what you get out of a class. What you may find surprising is that your prof (probably) wants to talk to you. Don’t take our word for it; we surveyed an assortment of professors from across the country and two of the most common things we heard from them were that they enjoy talking to students, and that too few students take the time to talk to their professors outside of class.
Talking to students lets profs know that they’re actually getting through. “I love it when students come to me and ask questions,” wrote professor Carolyn Eyles of McMaster University. “It shows they are interested in the material and I’ll always spend time with them.”
The questions students ask provide professors with valuable feedback about their communication style, letting them know what is and what is not being understood by their classes. “I do learn a lot from student questions. I learn to communicate a lot better,” said Patangi Rangachari, also of McMaster.
But what can talking to your professors do for you? Lots. There are reasons why you go to campus every day, instead of just staying home and learning from a textbook.
The most obvious thing your professor can do is help you understand something from the lecture or the readings that you just can’t get. There is more than one way to skin a cat, and there is more than one way to approach whatever concept you’re having trouble with. “Explain to us where we came short in the lecture, and we will offer you another perspective on the issue so you can understand it better,” says Mercedes Rowinsky-Geurts of Wilfred Laurier University.
If you talk to them in person, many professors will give you a more detailed preview of what is going to be on an upcoming exam, to help you focus your studying. Some will even provide sample exam questions to practice on. Profs will discuss essay topics with students, and may be willing to go over an outline or even a complete draft of your essay with you.
Mature students want to be understood
Conference at Ryerson draws large numbers, raises important issues
Some time ago I wrote a series of posts concerning mature students, starting with this one. It became an interesting discussion on the various resources that are available (or not available) for mature students. And it was at least part of the motivation for a mature students’ conference that just occurred at Ryerson University, a year later, and where I recently had the pleasure of speaking along with other very interesting panelists.
Big kudos to the Mature Students’ Association at Ryerson (MSAR) for organizing the first-time event. Hopefully it won’t be the last. Certainly the response would justify a regular conference. Of the 130+ attendees most were from the GTA, but a small contingent came down from Guelph and a single intrepid soul ventured down from Lakehead. Additionally, a group of students skyped in from Mount Allison. Isn’t technology wonderful? In any event, the response was enthusiastic, to say the least.
I won’t attempt to summarize the entire content of the conference but a few impressions seem particularly significant. First, just about everyone who doesn’t come from York was deeply envious of the very significant support that mature and part-time students enjoy at York, through the Atkinson Centre. Clearly York has set the standard to follow — and indeed the ability to reference such a benchmark will likely do a lot of good for mature students at other institutions. Good ideas may be emulated elsewhere. And as mature students are a growing demographic, no institution wants to be left behind on this one.
Of course we talked about future employment and the job market. I believe as much as anyone in learning for the love of it, but mature students have even less margin to ignore the financial realities than other students do. Jeremy O’Krafka from RECSOLU spoke on that topic, which is an area where the needs and concerns of mature students diverge especially from those of “traditional” students. His anecdote about younger students showing up with parents to speak with prospective employers struck a particular chord, but that’s probably a topic for another article.
As for myself, I contributed the observation that however much an institution may support mature students, the vast majority of campus resources and opportunities will still remain general to all students. So finding a way to access those opportunities and networks, while perhaps more difficult for mature students, is nevertheless critical. But as so often occurs, I was partially preaching to the already converted. The students who organized and showed up for this conference clearly know how to access the resources available to them. Some even accessed funding from their unions to attend.
Participants referred, on several occasions, to recent stories about how mature students are “competing” with younger school applicants. I agree that coverage of this sort is symptomatic of an unhelpful attitude that suggests mature students are somehow less legitimate as students. But a better observation on this topic is simply that it’s the new market reality. We keep hearing about how we’ll all have several careers, right? Well, for some, that necessarily suggests retraining. There’s no sense resenting older students for being where a lot of us will be in the future — there’s only a question of how the post-secondary system needs to adapt in response.
As a final observation, I sincerely hope that this growing interest among mature students in their shared identity and experiences forms the basis of a lasting association. The more mature students take an interest in their institutions and their education the happier I’ll be. Not only is it in their obvious self-interest to do so, but I also find that mature students exert a positive and productive influence on every student organization they become involved with. They are deeply motivated to be constructive — even while pursuing their criticisms — and a little more of that attitude would do a world of good for the student cause.
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Questions are welcome at jeff.rybak@utoronto.ca. Even the ones I don’t post will still receive answers, and where I do use them here I’ll remove identifying information.
Propaganda alert
Campus conspiracy theories — not just for nutjobs anymore
In this piece, I’m about to break a cardinal rule of the Internet (twice!) and lend traffic and promotion to sites I consider inherently ridiculous. I allow myself this exception to the rule because the two sites are at opposite ideological extremes. I figure the net effect should be about even.
For some time now, Campus Conservative Watch has been a bit of an inside joke. This site alleges a vast and organized attempt by conservative forces to subvert the student movement and to infiltrate campuses across Canada. Particularly funny is this bit, where they call out the media. Macleans On Campus is one of the targets. And while there are sometimes opinions on this site that I don’t agree with either, I can absolutely promise that I wasn’t subjected to ideological screening before I was recruited to write here. If I had been, I can’t imagine I would have passed muster by any conservative standard.
That is the problem with Campus Conservative Watch, after all, and why some think it’s just a really elaborate joke. We all dislike people coming from different political perspectives, at times, but when you lump them all into a group and allege conspiracy among them it’s just a little too convenient. Anyone who disagrees with you — and in particular with your paranoid theories — becomes a part of the opposition and therefore a part of the conspiracy! It’s very neat and self-proving. This site uses the term “conservative” in the way McCarthy used the term “communist.” It’s a bogeyman word intended to encompass everything disagreeable and threatening. And needless to say, any term that removes discussion from the substance of what’s actually going on and turns the opposition into a faceless “them” is self-defeating at best and dangerous at worst.
And then, I ran across The Undercurrent. I’m still a little stunned this “campus newspaper” actually exists. I don’t even have words — you’ll just have to read it.
By “the country” they mean the United States. But they don’t seem to have any issues with distributing the paper in Canada too. And you know, it does look like a campus newspaper! Initially, I was fooled into thinking it was a local product of some sort. It’s especially tricky at U of T Scarborough because our local paper is The Underground. It’s very plausible that some clever person figured they’d riff off that with The Undercurrent. But no such luck.
The very notion of producing an ideological propaganda piece of this nature and calling it a “campus newspaper” is highly suspect. In what sense is it “campus?” It only tangentially relates to education issues. It is written mainly by students, yes, but certainly not from U of T. By that same definition I could credibly describe the local Starbucks as a “campus initiative” because the employees are mostly students of one sort or another. But we all know that isn’t what we mean in the ordinary sense of the word when we describe something as belonging to the campus. We mean our campus. This isn’t a campus newspaper. It’s propaganda aimed at a valuable demographic that the right-wing fringe is seeking to influence. I can’t possibly describe it as anything else. It isn’t even a national conspiracy — it’s an international one!
I almost feel as though I owe an apology to Campus Conservative Watch. They were right all along! Or I’d owe them an apology, at least, if they actually noticed this rag and said something about it. Instead, I suppose, they were focused on the “conservative conspiracy” among students who happen to not like the CFS. But I’ll give them points for effort, at least. When I finally realized what I was looking at, in The Undercurrent, I thought immediately of the paranoid little blog that almost-could. Wow they missed a chance to be relevant!
And here I’m left with a depressing thought. In spite of my desire to believe otherwise, post-secondary campuses are, in fact, a ripe target for ideologues. Conspiracy theories all sound nutty, on first glance, but that doesn’t mean they are all wrong. The student movement has been subverted before and may be again. And the culprits, lest I be misunderstood, come from every portion of the political spectrum. The fringe left, as it were, is no more above dirty pool than the fringe right.
All I can suggest is that students remain alert for bullshit of this sort on campus, and call it out when you see it. Extremes from one side inevitably breed extremes on the other. Those who are most inclined to cry “foul!” on the opposition are often the last to accept criticism or scrutiny themselves. So be especially skeptical of anyone who alleges someone else is lying and then demands you accept their own claims uncritically. What could be less consistent than that? Be critical of my claims as well. Review the material for yourself. It’s certainly a trip, if nothing else.
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Questions are welcome at jeff.rybak@utoronto.ca. Even the ones I don’t post will still receive answers, and where I do use them here I’ll remove identifying information.
No holiday for high school students
For many students, applying to get into a university is like applying for a job
The holiday break could prove a busy and stressful time for high school seniors in Ontario facing a Jan. 13 deadline to apply to university and a demand for high grades to enter competitive programs.
While the Ontario Universities’ Application Centre began receiving applications in November, many students will spend the holidays submitting forms before the deadline to ensure they’re guaranteed full consideration, said OUAC director George Granger.
Tyler Carson is among those students competing for a coveted spot next year.
The 17-year-old Toronto student says he did a lot of research over the past two years into which university he should go to next fall. The Sir Wilfrid Laurier Collegiate Institute senior visited four university campuses in the Toronto area and checked out schools and programs online.
Carson applied to the University of Toronto, York University, Wilfrid Laurier University and McGill University to study sexual diversity and human rights. He later hopes to attend law school. Carson, who is student council vice-president, founder of the school’s first gay-straight alliance, and has a 94 per cent average, says he’s not worried about being accepted into a top university.
“I’m pretty confident I’ll get into all the generalized programs. I’m applying to Vic One which is a specialized program at U of T that only accepts around 25 kids from my stream, so that will be competitive,” he said.
For many students, applying to get into a university is like applying for a job.
The guidance counsellor at Carson’s school, Renee Rawlins, advises students to get their applications in early and do research. That includes speaking to recruitment officers, going to campuses, and looking into university programs and requirements, such as prerequisite high school courses and marks needed.
Business and engineering programs are more competitive than Bachelor of Arts programs, and require students to have marks in the mid 80s to 90s to get in, she said. “A student with a 55 per cent average in their six courses — they’re not looking to be very competitive anywhere,” said Rawlins. “If you have 90, we can say, well, you’ll be very competitive anywhere.”
