Rating Our Universities

Young Canadians are now a couple of weeks into their classes at universities and colleges across the country, and many are wondering about the quality of education they're receiving. That's because almost two dozen universities have refused to participate in one of the country's most popular guides to picking schools: Macleans' annual ranking issue. The universities say the magazine's analysis is "oversimplified and arbitrary." But it's not enough to leave it at that: students and their parents need information about quality to help them choose a university or college.

Life has not been easy for post-secondary institutions over the past 15 years. First there were funding cuts as provinces passed on the pain of the federal government's reduced transfers. Then there were numerous changes in reporting requirements, as some provinces introduced performance measures in an effort to better hold universities and colleges to account for the spending of taxpayers' dollars, and a roller-coaster ride in tuition policy. There's also been some recent reinvestment by provinces, and some new federal initiatives to support research and enhance student aid. But despite those recent increases, government funding in most provinces is below the pre-cut era.

So, how can we determine what impact this has had on educational quality? How should we measure the quality of education right now? And what steps can be taken to improve the quality at universities and colleges?

Recent research we did on post-secondary quality showed that too often, measuring quality has meant comparing the size of libraries, or graduates' success in the kind of jobs they land, instead of looking at the learning experience itself.

A quality controversy

It's hard to assess this since people and governments have different expectations for post-secondary education, and different concepts of what a quality education means. That's why we need a wide range of indicators from which people (and governments) can select what is important to them, which might be earnings after graduation, job satisfaction, participation in the community, or other desirable outcomes from the point of view of the individual or the wider society.

But the money crisis in post-secondary education since 1990 also raises the question: what policy changes can be made to encourage institutions to strive for excellence -- while ensuring that students from low-income families can afford to attend?

What we need is a transparent quality improvement process that recognizes the diversity of the institutions. In Fostering Quality in Canada's Post-Secondary Institutions, we suggest the provincial government:

• publicly state its goals for the post-secondary system;
• allow universities and colleges the flexibility to define their own quality improvement objectives and process, taking into account the system's goals; and
• monitor institutions to ensure that quality improvement is serious and that institutions go about it in a transparent way.

For their part, colleges and universities would be bound to:

• make public their missions and objectives;
• report, in easy-to-understand language, their plans to achieve their objectives and progress made against them; and
• report tuition rates, class sizes, faculty-to-student ratios, retention rates and graduation rates, by program.

In short, post-secondary institutions would be making a bargain with governments, with parents and students and with taxpayers. In return for being allowed to chart their own course, they would have to be more open about what they're doing. The key to this bargain is transparency.

There is another important element needed in the effort to improve quality in post-secondary education: more research on pedagogy in PSE. Unfortunately most innovations in teaching are not systematically evaluated. And that is ironic for institutions of learning and research.

Ron Saunders is a director of CPRN, a national not-for-profit research institute whose mission is to create knowledge and lead public dialogue and debate on social and economic issues important to the well-being of Canadians, in order to help build a more just, prosperous and caring society.