Fair access to university
What will it take to make postsecondary education within the grasp of more Canadians?
by Rosanna Tamburri
Over the past two decades, university tuition fees have risen substantially in Canada. And so has the hand-wringing over whether our postsecondary institutions, and universities in particular, are beyond the financial reach of many young Canadians. Half of high-school students from well-off families go on to college or university, compared with 30 percent from low-income families. This gap has remained stubbornly fixed despite the substantial sums – now topping
$6 billion a year – that governments plow into financial aid programs.
Why has there been so little progress in fixing this disparity? This is the question at the heart of Who Goes? Who Stays? What Matters? Accessing and Persisting in Post-Secondary Education in Canada, an edited collection by some of the best-known researchers in the field.
In determining who goes on to PSE, money takes a back seat to family background and a host of other cultural factors, the authors contend, refuting what has long been the conventional wisdom that
high tuition rates account for the disparity.
Ross Finnie and Richard Mueller, professors at the University of Ottawa and University of Lethbridge, respectively (and two of the book’s editors), find that more important than family income is the level of parental education. This has a more direct effect on who will attend college or university, especially university. If at least one parent holds a bachelor’s degree, the student is much more likely to go on to PSE. Grades, personal attitudes towards education, study habits and reading ability are also important factors that steer some students, and not others, towards higher education.
Marc Frenette, a research economist at Statistics Canada, suggests that the gap in university attendance between low- and high-income youth is largely due to academic preparation rather than financial barriers. Students in the top income segment perform better on standardized tests and have higher marks. They’re also more likely to have parents with university degrees and who have higher expectations about PSE.
Some of the most interesting chapters deal with another segment of society that is increasingly shut out of universities: boys. Since the mid 1980s, women have been more likely than men to attend university; they now outnumber men three to two on Canadian campuses, and the gap appears to be growing. One chapter looks at the role of students’ aspirations in explaining this phenomenon. By age 15, the authors find, girls already have higher aspirations for attaining postsecondary education than boys of the same age. Yes, girls generally have higher marks than boys, and students with higher marks – both boys and girls – tend to go to university (and boys and girls with low marks tend not to go). But it’s intriguing that among students with average grades, more girls than boys aspire to and eventually attend university. This gap in educational aspirations, the authors conclude, is a source of the gender imbalance.
A wealth of wide-ranging, interesting information is packed into the 14 chapters; much of it would be of interest to parents trying to steer their children down the appropriate educational path, as well as to academics. Jorgen Hansen, a professor at Concordia University, looks at the effects of part-time work and extra-curricular activities on high-school marks. He finds that working more than five hours a week reduces academic achievement, and this detrimental effect increases with the numbers of hours worked. Extra-curricular activities, on the other hand, significantly improve academic performance.
“We might sum up these findings by saying that culture matters more than money in determining who gains access to PSE,” the authors conclude. From this vantage point, it’s hardly surprising that government policies that focus on affordability and financial aid have failed to fix the system’s inequities.
The findings don’t represent a widely held view and are sure to ruffle a few feathers. Student groups in particular have vociferously discounted such findings in the past and continue to advocate for lower tuition rates and increased student aid as the best way to reduce the income gap. Governments, too, continue to see political value in freezing tuition fees and increasing educational tax credits.
It’s not that the authors advocate for reductions in financial aid. On the contrary, they argue that Canada’s system of grants and loans for low-income students is beneficial and necessary. But they say the burning question is: what further policy efforts are required to overcome the financial inequities of our PSE system?
Unfortunately, this is the one area where the book falls short, failing to provide any policy prescriptions to address the problem. What seems clear is that future policy efforts should be geared to reaching students much earlier in their lives. Because by the time they reach university age, sadly it’s too late.
Who Goes? Who Stays? What Matters? Accessing and Persisting in Post-Secondary Education in Canada
, edited by Ross Finnie, Richard E. Mueller, Arthur Sweetman and Alex Usher, McGill-Queens University Press, 2008, 368 pages.
Journalist Rosanna Tamburri writes often about financing of Canadian postsecondary education.
