In the back-to-school hand-wringing over the state of education, most Canadians overlook perhaps the most important issue facing us: the future of graduate studies.
Alain Joseph is working on an interdisciplinary doctoral degree at Dalhousie University in Halifax
Alain Joseph is working on an interdisciplinary doctoral degree at Dalhousie University in Halifax
More University Report Card 2007 Reports
Years ago, obtaining an undergraduate degree was special because so few people received one. After 45 years of largely successful policies to expand access to higher education, we've more or less erased the cachet of a bachelor's degree. Having done that, we're now faced with two unpleasant realities.
The first is that it turns out that education is like fashion: the utility of a degree declines somewhat if everybody else has one. So, today, in order to distinguish oneself in the job market, some further education is usually necessary.
The second is that, for a country like Canada, having a high proportion of university-educated youth no longer means very much, either. World enrolment at the undergraduate level is up almost 60 per cent since 1998, based on UNESCO data, and the vast majority of this growth is occurring in East Asia. So it's not only that individuals can't compete with just an undergraduate degree — our entire country's claim to having a workforce with superior levels of education is under threat as well. The education advantage Canadians believe they have is simply slipping away.
These pressures are unlikely to abate any time soon, either. The human capital needs of the new economy, particularly in the sciences, is the driving force behind the growth of graduate studies. The cutting edge of the new economy lies in the incredibly complex world of information studies, nanotechnology and genetic sciences. The amount of knowledge required to work at the forefront of technological growth industries is much greater than it was 30 years ago and requires greater investments in education.
We can lament this situation all we want. We can wring our hands about the over-reliance on degrees to confer status, and how we've devalued undergraduate education by giving out too many degrees. We can talk about getting students to learn more efficiently in earlier grades and toughening up standards in undergraduate education. But none of it will make a bit of difference. The key challenge in higher education in the first half of the 21st century will be the expansion of graduate studies.
It's not like we haven't been warned. Data from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Develpment has for a few years suggested Canada's attainment rates from advanced research programs is 0.8 per cent of the relevant age population, compared to an OECD average of 1.3 per cent. The main problem is institutions need more money to create spaces to fill the growing need.
In one province, Ontario, we have a provincial government that has heeded the nature of the problems and created its own plan of action to deal with this knowledge deficit. But it is the only province to have set aside money specifically to increase graduate enrolment. For the moment, most other provinces seem blissfully unaware of the scale of the challenge.
Make no mistake — it is a huge challenge. Educating graduate students is a lot more expensive than teaching undergraduates. You can't herd 200 of them into a single classroom for a start; they need much more personal attention. Assuming no change in the way we teach them, each graduate student costs between two and three times what an undergraduate student does.
This means that increasing the number of graduate students will create a much greater financial burden for universities than would a similar increase in the number of undergraduate students. In a study I performed for the C.D. Howe Institute last year with my colleague Ross Finnie at the University of Ottawa, we estimated that doubling Canada's graduate student intake over the next 10 years would cost somewhere in the vicinity of $5 billion a year in new money — roughly equivalent to the operating budgets of the entire Ontario university system. And that's on top of regular operating costs, rising salaries, and whatever it costs to educate increasing numbers of undergraduates, too.
There are three possible ways to deal with this figure. Either government pays the bill, students pay the bill, or institutions find a way to reduce the cost per student. None of these options are easy, and the solution will probably involve a little from all three.
Asking government to pay the bill is going to be somewhat difficult. Politically, governments like to spend money either on things which provide them with photo opportunities (such as ribbon-cuttings at new buildings) or provide cash in voters' pockets (such as tuition freezes and tax credits). Core operating funding is a tough sell — especially if its intended target is not the broad mass of students but a smaller and more elite subgroup of students. It's not impossible — witness Ontario's recent efforts to expand graduate enrolment — but it's a tough sell.
Institutions can reduce the cost of providing education, but there will be inevitable costs. At the graduate level, we can expect increases in the size of classes and seminars. At the undergraduate level, class sizes will increase, and there will be a reduction in the number of expensive, tenured faculty teaching undergraduate courses. Indeed, we may even see the introduction of cheaper teaching-only staff at the undergraduate level (although this could arguably be a significant improvement for students).
Finally, we can ask students to pay more, but this is perhaps the most difficult task of all. Institutions are increasingly in the business of paying graduate students, especially at the PhD level, rather than seeking payment. And if undergraduates are asked to pay more, they will likely resist paying greater sums of money to improve not their own education but those of graduate students.
The key difficulty, in the end, is that graduate education is, and always will be, an elite pursuit and, as a result, there aren't a lot of populist brownie points to be won by confronting this issue. But the choice isn't really about graduate versus undergraduate; it's about whether Canada wants to be at the forefront of the global knowledge economy of the 21st century. If we do, we need to make some painful choices about resources. Refusing to make those choices will guarantee us a slow drift into economic irrelevance and decay.
— Alex Usher is vice-president of the Educational Policy Institute
