Posts tagged with canada.
Canadian unis don't produce many PhDs. So what?
The Conference Board of Canada released its annual report card on education yesterday. The report, available online, says we are doing very well in all areas of education with the exception of producing PhDs.
The Conference Board reported Canada is No. 1 for college graduates and fifth of out the 17 countries surveyed for the percentage of the population with a university degree.
Combined, 48.3 per cent of our population has completed a higher education program. The four other countries with a higher percentage of the population holding university degrees are not even close.
This is because their college graduation rates are horrendous. Whereas 23.7 per cent of Canadians have completed college, only 2.4 per cent of Norwegians have. Though Norway holds No. 1 for university grads with 31.9 per cent (compared to Canada's 24.6 per cent) this figure, when combined with their college output, puts them at more than 15 percentage points behind Canada.
The other three countries beating Canada in the university table, the U.S. (30.9), Netherlands (29.1), and Denmark (25.5), all languish in the college table with percentages of 9.4, 1.7, and 6.7 respectively.
When the complete higher education picture is presented, Canada is not just competing with its peers; we're beating them!
However, not all looks good in the report; Canada is dead last among the 17 countries for the number of PhD graduates our universities are producing. This seems like a dire problem when looking at the snapshot presented in the report. If we were a country such as Australia, geographically isolated from other developed nations, it would be a dire concern.
But we are not Australia; we enjoy the advantage of sharing a border with a country hosting the greatest doctoral universities in the world.
Canadians have access to these universities and hundreds of our brightest minds attend top-tier American universities to earn their PhD.
Universities will suggest this problem, like all others in higher education, can be solved if governments just shovelled more no-strings-attached money in their direction. Instead, the government should look at a two-pronged approach to addressing this non-crisis problem.
The first is to create a national vision for higher education; we need to decide where PhD programs will be taught and what disciplines those PhD programs will teach. The last thing Canada needs is more English Literature PhDs stirring lattes at Starbucks.
The second, which can be quickly implemented, is to create a funding program for Canadian citizens pursuing graduate education outside of Canada. We live in a global world and we need more Canadian expatriates building the relationships needed to further Canada's interests outside our borders.
In the end, it's better to have the world's most educated population than to have the most PhDs in the world while lagging in all other measurements.
(Poll: Does Canada need more PhDs?)
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JOEY COLEMAN