Post-secondary in peril: why higher ed in Ontario is stuck in the past

Academic Transformation: The forces reshaping higher education in Ontario

Ian D. Clark, Greg Moran, Michael L. Skolnik, David Trick

For the past six years, my beloved institution has been working toward enhancing the undergraduate student experience as its primary objective under the academic planning framework. A couple of weeks ago, I asked a room of about 40 relatively engaged students (residence dons) what they thought the top priority for the University has been. “Increasing graduate enrolment?” Nope. Though that is a newly established objective. “International student recruitment?” A priority, yes. But not the top one. “Research excellence?”  It took about ten tries.

When I asked them if they could name any changes they’d witnessed as a result of this priority in action, there were some snickers. A few good answers too, but lots of smirks.

Positive change on the student experience – both inside and outside the classroom – has been incremental here at the University of Toronto, despite a University-wide commitment and millions in new funding to kick-start new projects. As all higher education institutions focusing on the student experience have learned, there is no roadmap. Or, as George Kuh, former director of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) is fond of saying, “There is no single blueprint to success.”

There are lots of things we can do – and we have done – to improve undergraduate education. But many of the barriers to improving quality in higher education are persistent and systemic. So say the authors of this new book that takes both a wide-angled lens and a microscope to the issues plaguing higher education in Ontario.

The authors, three professors (two U of T, one Western) and a higher ed consultant, isolate the turning point in the 1960s when two key provincial policy decisions were made – the first limiting the role of the colleges, and the second giving institutional autonomy to universities. As a result, undergraduate education, until very recently anyways, was the exclusive domain of the universities in Ontario (a situation that is not the case in some other provinces.) This might be less than disastrous if not for the fact that virtually every university, in turn, has adopted that same model: the research university. And the research university is without a doubt, say the authors, “the most expensive type of post-secondary institution.”

Meanwhile, we’ve got increasing demand for undergraduate education from an increasingly diverse population. The result: an unsustainable model.

Academic Transformation is a very detailed, very thorough explanation of how post-secondary education in Ontario works – from the provincial funding model, to the production of knowledge, to access and accountability for undergraduate education. They tackle tough issues: are teaching and research truly compatible? Is the baccalaureate the appropriate credential for an applied program at a community college? Or could there be another designation? Does the mounting competition amongst universities for the “best and brightest” lead to more merit-based rather than needs-based aid? And what effect does that have for marginalized groups?

The books paints a bleak picture. The players – colleges, universities, government – are pretty entrenched in the status quo. But the authors do attempt to sketch a way out, prescribing a new system with differentiation among universities – and set of institutions focused on undergraduate education exclusively.

Academic Transformation will certainly open the eyes of most student affairs professionals in Ontario — both in the college and university sector — to the some of the intricacies of the higher education system. For me, it helped explain why progress on enhancing the undergraduate experience for  research universities seems to fall prey to the one-step-forward, two-steps-backward paradigm.

– Deanne Fisher

This just in: new Canadian(!) book on student services

I have just learned that the long-awaited book on student services in Canada, by Donna Hardy Cox and Carney Strange, is due out February 15, 2010 from McGill-Queen’s University Press.  Achieving Student Success: Effective Student Services in Canadian Higher Education is book-ended by chapters from Hardy Cox and Strange but also includes chapters on everything from enrolment management, to residence life, judicial affairs and student service management, written by CACUSS colleagues from across the country.

You can pre-order it now online at McGill-Queen’s University Press (paper or cloth). Hoping many of you will do so and read in time for CACUSS 2010 in Edmonton.

– D.F.

Write new blog post. Check!

I am reading Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, by management consultant David Allen. I have only read one-third of the book. I want to finish the book. I want to finish the book because I want to write a review on my blog about it. Applying Allen’s method, here’s how I proceed:

1. Collect things that command my attention. Writing a blog post is one of many things — including getting new glasses, developing a student survey and preparing the 2010-11 budget for my department –commanding my attention right now. I collect them all in a little application called NoteBook. But you could use any “bucket” to collect all your stuff — as long as it’s all in one place.

Working horizontally in a vertical culture

Organizing Higher Education for Collaboration:
A guide for campus leaders
Adrianna L. Kezar & Jaime Lester
Published by Jossey-Bass: A Wiley Imprint. 2009.

If you are interested in improving student learning and engagement on your campus, then you have probably deduced that collaboration is, at least to some degree, the key to success. It inspires innovation, leads to better service, motivates staff, and can even decrease costs. So if collaboration is such a compelling solution to our woes, why, then, is it so difficult to achieve? Adrianna Kezar and Jaime Lester provide some of the answers by studying, in great depth, the organizational culture of institutions that demonstrate a high level of collaboration.

Welcome (again) to CACUSS Reads

The sixth installment of Open Book – a annual panel discussion on recent literature in student affairs – has just come to a close. Thanks to Tim Rahilly, Margot Bell and Bruce Belbin for sharing their thoughts on such a wide range of topics. If you didn’t get a copy of it at the session (or you didn’t attend the session!) you can download our 2009booklist.

For those of you new to the blog, please contribute. Any visitor can comment on one of the reviews. Just hit the “Leave a comment” link at the bottom of any article.

If you’d like to contribute a full review, you have two options: 1. send it to me and I’ll post it for you or 2. send me an email requesting a “contributor” account and I’ll set you up so you can post. (If you are new to WordPress, you will find it quite easy to use – fun really.)

I’ll keep posting reviews throughout the year – and look forward to seeing you all in Edmonton for Open Book VII!

- Deanne.

Sneak peak at Open Book VI

The annual CACUSS conference is only a week away and my fellow panelists and I are frantically reading away in preparation for sixth annual installment of the Open Book session. Our complete list of recommended (or not!) recent student affairs titles will be available at the session (Wednesday, June 17, 11 am) but in case you need a bit more enticing to come see us — or you want to read ahead and contribute your own thoughts — here are a few of the books we’re reading:

Apparently, the kids are more than alright

A few months ago, I posted a short review of Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation, a provocatively titled tirade about his profound disappointment with the so-called digital natives – those born with the advantage of information at their fingertips – and their seemingly narcissistic, celebrity-obsessed, self-indulgent ways.

Now comes the antidote: Grown Up Digital: How the net generation is changing your world by Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics, and adjunct professor at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. Where Bauerlein sees unhealthy addiction to gaming, Tapscott sees new forms of global collaboration. While Bauerlein laments the loss of literature as a popular pastime, Tapscott revels in the development of new reading skills – non-linear reading that requires sorting and synthesis. In other words, where one sees the end of civilization as we know it, the other sees salvation.

Learning to “dance through complexity”

Admittedly, I’m finding it a bit of a stretch to include The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking (2007, Harvard Business School Press) in a blog dedicated to recent literature in student affairs. But author Roger Martin is one of the keynote speakers at this year’s CACUSS Conference so I thought it fitting that I give his book a read in anticipation of the wisdom he might share with us in Waterloo in June.

Is technology fostering a “generational cocoon”?

Last March, I was involved in the planning of a musical event on our campus to mark the UN Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. We had lined up some students to do the introductions to the day’s performances. A few minutes before showtime, I handed one of the volunteers the text on the background for the day he was to incorporate into his intro. He quickly reviewed it aloud and stopped at the word “apartheid”, stared at it for a moment, and asked, “How do I pronounce this word?” I told him and he dutifully practiced it a couple of times, as if it were his first encounter with the term.

I had a “How can this be?” moment but quickly wrote it off to a range of possible reasonable explanations: a learning disability, nerves, familiarity with the concept but just not the word in written form. He executed his duties smoothly and I applauded his commitment to the issues.

What the student affairs professional learned about marketing

Perhaps I have succumbed to the dark side. At a recent trip to the local bookstore, I found myself lured toward the business section, that mysterious zone beyond the computer manuals. I ventured there thinking I might find something practical about using new media – aka Web 2.0, aka Social Media, aka the LiveWeb – to engage students in the life of the University. (Yes, I am aware of the irony of going to a bookstore to learn about the internet.) What I found was Denise Shiffman’s The Age of Engage: Reinventing Marketing for Today’s Connected, Collaborative, and Hyperinteractive Culture, a book that I have found immensely useful in rethinking how we communicate with students.