Post Secondary: Change of Course

by Andrew Findlay

| November 5, 2008

Image by: Darryl Humphrey

Andy Longhurst is just the kind of student a university dean would love to have on campus. Bright, motivated and discerning, Longhurst started researching his post-secondary plans well before receiving a high-school diploma from the principal at Point Grey Secondary in June 2008. When it was time to start filling out applications last winter, he had already visited campuses, talked to sophomores at the student union lounges, picked the brains of freshmen on Facebook, perused course calendars and read magazine articles and university reviews. With an eye on a future in public and foreign policy, Longhurst astutely focused his search on Ontario universities close to the corridors of national power.

“You can read the polls and the Maclean’s magazine ratings, but for me it really came down to how people feel about the school and what kind of community I wanted to be part of,” says Longhurst, a 19-year-old dual Canadian-American citizen, whose family moved from Oregon to Vancouver two years ago for the opportunity of a first-rate Canadian education without the stomach-churning $50,000 tuition.

These days budding scholars such as Longhurst have their pick of universities and colleges. Competition among B.C.’s post-secondary institutions to attract the best and brightest is fierce, and in many ways our ivory towers are on shaky foundations. Despite big promises made by the B.C. Liberals in recent years to make the province top dog in the country in post-secondary education, funding is shrinking as our population ages and the pool of high school graduates diminishes. At the same time, a dizzying array of programming is on offer in the education industry, from the traditional, such as a classic liberal arts education, to the obscure, such as the new sports management diploma in surfing studies being developed by North Island College.

So as universities grapple with enrolment challenges, it was with some befuddlement that many people observed Premier Gordon Campbell as he waltzed around the Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island last spring with his magic wand, anointing five colleges with full-fledged university designation. Among them are the newly minted Emily Carr University of Art and Design (formerly Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design), Vancouver Island University (Malaspina University-College), Capilano University (Capilano College), Kwantlen Polytechnic University (Kwantlen University-College) and University of the Fraser Valley (University College of the Fraser Valley).

“It’s not lost on any of us that the designations came at a time when there were serious budgetary pressures,” says Don Avison, president of the University Presidents’ Council of B.C. (TUPC), over the phone from his office in downtown Victoria.

The timing of these announcements was odd, to say the least. While students were cramming for finals last March and Campbell was making his university proclamations, UBC was dealing with an $11.3-million cut to its operating grant, Camosun College was poised to slash 112 already dedicated student seats thanks to a $1.2-million budget cut and New Westminster’s Douglas College was about to take the pruning shears to 14 different programs. In fact, many of the province’s 25-plus universities and colleges were seeing budgetary shortfalls and more and more empty seats in classrooms.

It’s not that the new university designations were entirely surprising to educators around the province. In April 2007, the Ministry of Advanced Education and Labour Market Development released its Campus 2020 plan. The report set some lofty goals, including making B.C. one of the top three spenders on basic and applied research by 2010, achieving the highest national level of per capita participation in post-secondary education by 2015 and bringing aboriginal post-secondary rates up to general population levels. To this end, the province promised to add 25,000 new post-secondary seats by 2010, to expand the pool of universities beyond the research-intensive big three of UBC, SFU and UVic, and to include a greater variety of so-called regional “special interest teaching universities.”

By a number of benchmarks, the province has a long way to go in meeting the Campus 2020 targets. B.C. ranks last in Canada in per capita university enrolment, with a little under three per cent of our population heading to university. We also have the lowest bachelor degree graduate rate in Canada, with just 25 per cent of 22-year-olds (considered the typical age of first-degree graduation) completing degrees. We also sit in the middle of the pack of Canadian provinces, at sixth, when it comes to trades training.

As for the new university designations, TUPC’s Avison calls them nominal in nature. After all, the Emily Carr institute was already a well-established and respected degree-granting institution – in other words, a de facto university. According to the Campus 2020 plan, university colleges cited offshore recruitment as “one of the key reasons” why a name change was necessary. Avison doesn’t buy that argument, pointing to prestigious Ivy League schools such as Dartmouth College and Harvard College, which have no difficulty attracting international tuition dollars.