Deconstructing Higher Education

does University still deliver on its promise to give students an educational experience that will both fill them with Wonder and help them get a meaningful job well recent evidence suggests there may be a growing mismatch between what students are learning and what the labor market wants ken Coates is co-author of dream factories why universities won't solve the youth jobs crisis and he joins us now for more it's nice to meet you in person it's great to be with you yeah we've had you on before but it was always on the satellite it's okay your book is about universities no longer being able to you know deliver the goods when it comes to the promise of turning learning into earning where's the general evidence for that boy it's all over the place and United States half of the people who get university degrees which represents only half the people who start a university program only half of them actually get jobs that require a degree in underemployment in Canada for many years has been second third fourth in the in the world in terms of university graduates who are doing jobs that don't require a university degree and there's two ways of looking at that one of them is to say all the universities are not doing a very good job of training people for the workforce and the other looking at is to say the workforce isn't receptive to university graduates they they can't take as many as there as they're being produced I think the number one problems we have way too many people coming out of the university with substandard qualifications they through the grew the core degrees or find the universities are fine but their abilities and their their were they've actually absorbed in their time in university this doesn't match up with expectations you're saying even with half the people who go into university dropping out we're still graduating too many University those American numbers we actually about 30% of the people who come in to Canadian universities don't complete their degrees it varies widely some universities the highest 50% and some places like Queens and Waterloo down around 1011 percent but it's still too many well it is in the sense that when you look and say why are people going to university overwhelmingly they're going to university to get a job that's the first mistake well of course it is universities are hard work they require a lot of creativity a lot of effort a lot of commitment right and if you're going there because your mom and dad tell you to go there to get a job and you even picked your program because you were told the electrical engineering is actually better than getting an English degree and you it might be wrong but you're going to the wrong things you're not enjoying it you're not there to absorb the knowledge in capital on the opportunities very very frustrating for the students right so we end up with real problems of commitment and real problems of dedication to their studies and we graduate people not all of them some brilliant students come through our system they reach the new crop of our university graduates are as good if not better than they've ever been before but with the lower end the bottom half of that court the people aren't very well educated because they haven't necessarily put the effort in themselves are the people who are really bright coming out of university really bright because they're really bright or because the university has helped make them really bright oh boy that's a hurtful question because in fact the research particularly good Americans have way better research on this and the research basically says that that you know a big portion of your success at the University and after university is determined by your family your educational backgrounds of your parents and your family income we know those going in if you want to pick the best cohort of students pick their postal codes find out where they come from you'll know about the income of the families their their personal wealth and you can pick the people who are likely to succeed and so somebody who is just University and goes to the University of Toronto gets a great degree in business and they prosper they become a millionaire well maybe their parents for millionaires Donald Trump father was a millionaire so you can't you're saying UT can't take credit for that well they take credit for all of it they do but they should they should be really careful about it right in a sense that they should be credit for the knowledge they put in the opportunities they provide I think universities are fantastic for the opportunities they give and it's mixed as to both the outcome in a technical field like engineering you can't just pick that up off the corner you can't just read a newspaper because you won't be excellent to that but there are lots and lots of people who do are really smart really bright don't go to university you have huge and wonderful careers without the benefit of those four years or five years or six years depending how long they how long they go let me toss a bunch of numbers at you here and then I'll get you to react to this this is from the Council of Ontario universities which of course is the body that represents all of the publicly funded University is not Terry I think is 20 of them they release the results of the Ontario graduates survey now this is admittedly four year old information here but six months after graduation the class of 2012 had an average income 7% below that of the class of 2005 seven years earlier two years after graduation incomes dropped to 14% below the class that graduated seven years earlier it's going in the wrong direction in other words why is that happening well it really is going in the wrong direction and that's incorrect to blame the universities for that because the universities are doing what they're the parents want doing what government wants and doing what the students want but the economy is shifted very very dramatically you know we've we've lost a huge number of middle-class jobs I remember seeing in it was a story very small story in the newspaper one of the banks that laid off 1,500 people over the course of a summer they do this in the summer times when the announcement comes out nobody notices it and they have another thing talking about improving customer performance which is about going online so they're getting more people are happy with their banking experience who the better what web site that they can use and 1,500 people no longer have a job if you leave 1,500 people off at a tomato factory in Leamington it's national news and for days and days and days 1,500 middle-class well-paid sort of professionals many of whom have university degrees and college diplomas they get laid off and it's just a bump in the story line and I think we've we've lost a lot of those jobs if you look at the way government has downsized if you look at the way that big corporations are operating taking out middle management positions you're talking about a changing labor market as opposed to anything universities are doing wrong right absolutely so but here's these things get complicated and I was a Dean of Arts to the University of Waterloo which is one of the great universities in North America I just adored my time there fifteen percent of the graduates from the College of Art Faculty of Arts went immediately to community colleges after they graduated so they went got our respiratory technologist diploma so a couple years down the line they're making $70,000 a year they've got a Bachelor of Arts in history which is my discipline respiratory technology diploma they're getting a job at a restaurant a way show up on the sponge scales as a success for the university are they they could have gone right out of high school and gotten that degree they maybe really wanted the history degree and God bless them it's a wonderful degree to have but in terms of career progress you know it'll be really careful about counting those numbers I get you but then I push back a little bit here the Community College can take credit for the fact that that person is a good respiratory therapist the university can take credit for the fact that that person is a better citizen right maybe so here's another one of the things I have trouble with around universities because when universities talk about this I love universities you're not a word you're never hear from he says I hate universe I adore universities wonderful environments great places to learn but we have a lot of students who don't come to class a lot of students who put their lousy assignments and a lot of students who don't read the newspaper a lot of students who aren't engaged in public affairs and it varies when I look at the really engaged undergraduates now there is brilliant and engaged as they were in the 1960s and we thought we invented them and transformed the world they're marvelous students with huge levels of commitment but you know these commuter campuses where students come and go and they don't have participate in campus affairs you know there those are harder to sort of prove that you get this wonderful bulbs and citizenship yes people who go to university or more likely to vote people of high income are also more likely to vote people of high income are more likely to go to university so which is the cause and consequence all right in which case do you think or put it this way at what point do you think universities lost their ability to make the claim that you come to us give us three four five however many years of your life and we guarantee you pretty much the solid middle-class dream come true well they do that a lot and you actually hear this phrase about the million dollar bonus that you get you go to a university make a million dollars more than you do if you if you don't go to Universal the course of you're not over the course of your life and that sounds great and that's that's a very attractive sort of element the problem with that is in average it's sort of and it's actually changing too it's not as strong as it was before because people go into Polytechnic so doing really well people going to select the college programs are doing really well the answer universities are too full there are certain programs where going to university is a requirement you want to be a doctor you've got to go want to be an accountant you have to go want to be an economist you have to go those pay high early high incomes the other people we've got lots of programs not a lot of programs some programs they're producing lower incomes than people who have just high school diplomas right because they're not career designed they're not intended to do that and that's perfectly fine as a way of getting on learning and getting an education understanding the world cultural studies or film studies can be absolutely brilliant but if the goal to get a degree and then get a university you get a job and they make a million dollars more than if you just got out of high school we know that isn't working and I think part of the problem my answer to this is the point in which we decided that access was the single most important thing in the university system that that opening up the floodgates letting more and more and more people in a higher percentage of students out of the high school system all the time opening up universities all over the all over the world all over the country and in Canada I was involved with the setting up of the university of northern British Columbia we went from an 8% high school University participation rate before we opened up to twenty four percent which is the national average the first year of operations that northern British Columbia that sounds good it's whatever but oh really does that devalue the value of the degree well this is an interesting case because there's a University of Ontario called Laurentian that's actually wonderful in this written in this regard I heard of it yeah exactly I know and and Thunder Bay does the same sort of thing there we brought a lot of people into the university of northern British Columbia who had never gone to university if family couldn't afford to have them relocate somebody living in Vancouver can go to great university Simon Fraser or UBC go to a whole bunch of university colleges Kwantlen capital animal whatever and they have by taking the bus you live in northern British Columbia live in Burns Lake if you actually you know live up in Timmins it's gonna cost you ten to fifteen twenty thousand dollars a year more than if somebody who lives in downtown Toronto to go to university so they weren't going at all so what you did in the cases like that those northern institutions cap touched into untapped potential got people into the system but they became part of a process of letting more and more and more people in and if you look at the grade point averages of people coming into some of those institutions they're dropping down because they're competing with all these larger universities now we're bringing in international students many of whom are wonderful bringing large numbers international students into our campuses but do you think that a remote Canadian University is top of mind for somebody in Shanghai who we're gonna willing to spend $200,000 for their child to go to university over four or five years they weren't thinking about those northern institutions or the rural institutions when they are making those plans they just couldn't get into the first hundred and fifty universities they really wanted to go to and so they basically the quality of the students has a huge impact that's why Harvard Stanford why you know Queens has such great results from some of their employment opportunities they bring in the best students here's you this is from an article you did in The Walrus magazine back in 2012 in the three generations since World War two Canadian universities have shifted from being preserves of the rich the gifted and the intensely ambitious into the academic equivalent of intramural sports where the premium rests on mass participation rather than on high achievement have the universities expanded beyond the point where excellence is now possible in your view the University System has expanded the way it's gone it ways developed we've allowed some of our university to become more selective the University of Waterloo's great Queens is great McGill is great these places have really high entrance standards they then have programs inside those those those classes so Vic one at the University of Toronto absolutely brilliant program I wish every student in the world could go to Vic one at the University of Toronto and be exposed to that he'll ever take 30 seconds to explain what it is what happens is in the first year at University of Toronto at Victoria University you basically go in and you sit down in a small class with some of the best teachers in the world best researchers and you have a personalized experience of first year University my daughter went to the University of Toronto she didn't actually get into that program she didn't even even try good things you wouldn't gotten in and she had an average of 350 students in each one of her first year classes most of her instructors were not full-time professors at the University she just stopped after one year and so what am I doing here you know so if you look at the way we actually teach you take the students in greatest need the ones that really need to be hand held and shaped and mentored and encouraged and stopped it in their tracks to say you show up in this class and then do your assignment how do you do it with a class of a hundred or thousand students can't you can't and you don't we save that for graduate school and if you actually we would we would reverse the whole process put your intense programs into the first year but those programs that we have like that and Cayden universities are for the elite we use them as recruitment tools you're a ninety two percent average or 96 percent average we really want you to come here come to this University come into Vic one or comparable programs and other institutions so it went to be careful here there some universities that have excellence has at their heart and soul and other universities that deliberately have access and so they're looking and saying we're gonna bring Aboriginal students out of rural Manitoba then we're bringing them into a campus they're not gonna obsess about what they do in their first year we're gonna work with them over four years and actually help them develop into into the kind of intellect and kind of professional they want to be advice like Brandon University has a 50% dropout rate there's a huge social cost to that it isn't just the cost of money time wasted and money money spent it's the actual fear of failure and the impact of failure on individuals my personal view is be really careful select people who are going to succeed and crank up our expectations let the students know that if they're coming to University attend participate read read and read and occasionally watch the agenda I like the last part of that advice do you know Ron's fregley at UPEI tiss okay not personally but I've read his stuff you read his stuff he was in The Walrus not too long ago now's a good time for a sip of water if you want because I'm gonna read a little excerpt peer of a piece that he wrote for the LA Review of Books he says there is no real education anymore but I still have to create the impression that education is happening this is a professor at UPEI speaking students will therefore come to class but they will not learn professors will give lectures but they will not teach students will receive grades but they will not earn them awards and degrees will be granted but they will exist only on paper smiling students will be photographed at graduation but they will not be happy oh Ken is it really all that bad yes and no in equal measure so on the on the know side as a professor I really resent that because I teach my wife teaches at the University of Saskatchewan we spend a huge amount much time she spends and you know she's emailing student you weren't in class yesterday you're coming in talk to me were to rewrite your essay you learn how to write so there are lots of professors lots and lots of professors who devote their heart and soul for their students and who agonize over failure just literally agonize over failure if they have a 1,200 students in a first year biology class they don't because there's no way they haven't got some resources to reach out and do that sort of thing so what happens is that is that that description is actually way more accurate than you might think students come in with computers on their desks and half of them we know from the research are why reading new emails watching telemovies doing things like that not engaging in the class why are you even here right but the every class has you know ten twenty thirty percent of the students completely engaged so a lot of the professors are wonderful teachers a lot of the students are wonderful learners but the problem is if people are coming for the wrong reason and are being selected because the universities need to pay their bills the number one fault of our system the number one fault of our system by far is is the fact that we have those bums and chairs financial model this is Richard just explained this is a funding formula that says you get more money as a university the more students you attract absolutely if you take a look I'm just pick on Lawrence again because I'm very fond of that institution it has a massive mandate to serve the central part of Ontario it reaches out he has Aboriginal programming is really excellent northern programming it pride professional opportunities for kids who would never have a chance to do them before these are great places IQ NBC it's like Brandon the University of Brunswick at st. John these are really really good schools doing doing a certain thing but they're on the same trajectory of having to find more students and if you take a look at what the the areas where the population is declining the Maritimes is that a catastrophic decline in high school graduate graduates coming into the system they are looking all around the world for somebody used to fill in the chairs and I I feel is that if there's a there's a moral question about letting somebody in when you know they have a really substantial chance of failure so the research is quite strong on this it doesn't mean it covers everybody if you come out of high school with it but less than a 75 at the low end eighty percent average out of high school your chances of succeeding are actually very small if it's below seventy five to eighty percent we know that but letting them in but what's the alternative there take more students in and don't give them more money to deal with the additional student role well you don't there's nothing it says universities have to be funded on the basis of the number of students you have in your chairs right Memorial University is funded on a block grant here's how much money do the best you can so that encourages them to bring fewer students and then bring in fewer students and to teach them better more effectively so is that the future in your eye I hope so I don't think so because you see when you look at government's you know the number of times where you hear government's talking about academic excellence and talking about the huge commitment of the people the students at the to make to go to university basically the politicians the political level the question is access they want to make sure that the the Mary and Bob will have two kids in remote university age if they want to go to university yep your kids can go to your alright let me pick up on this because I wonder how much of this is the students and how much of this is really the parents and I'm gonna show some stat scans number here excuse me statistics Canada numbers here apparently sixty-seven percent of parents want their children to go to university compared with fifteen percent who hope for college or seige yet in Quebec two percent wish for their kids to get a trade certificate this is about parents wanting to be able to say Johnny got into university isn't it well they really want to say Johnny got out of the university or Mary go to university they absolutely want them to go put an enormous pressure on the kids early on my mother and father when that was a really kid used to have the the mother's allowance baby bonus yeah and they put that money aside every single month directly into our University savings account and they told me every month it was in the university savings got when you put more money in there so you know there was no question in your mind you were going to university all my mother would have shot me I love my mother she's a wonderful lady and she just she didn't get to go and so their her this was this golden chalice that you could reach up and grab and it was his absolutely wonderful thing the numbers are even higher in the Maritimes because a university degree is seen as a sort of a ticket into prosperity and middle class opportunity all the things we've kind of talked about before I mean no question that people see it that way but the other side of it is is this degradation of the value of physical labor and outside labor and the the the apprenticeship programs and the trades programs we have jobs without people and people absolutely and we have a mind of my favorite institutions in the country because they're evolving so quickly right now are the politics where they have the the four years of study for more intensive things that are more complicated than diploma type programs that are two-year intensive sort of opportunities they're very much connected to regional job markets they have the employers coming in and telling them what to teach and coordinating in that way so if you want a job there's lots of places you go to Sai aster in in Saskatchewan SAS poly if you go to nature Satan Alberta BCIT if you go to George Brown Sheridan charity is one of the most brilliant post-secondary institutions in the country and you know when you look at when politicians go to talk about innovation they all go to Waterloo god bless them we love to say all of them and everything to game down the city water new kitchen or love to having them come well what's wrong with Sheridan Sheridan is a brilliant post-secondary institution and it is very much sort of in the parental mindset particularly among new Canadians and new Canadians come here they value education generally higher it's part of their strategy you immigrate into Canada you have access to an inexpensive public education system they push the kids really strongly into those into those fields many of them do exceptionally well but some of them actually should have been truck drivers and the children bulldozer operators or electricians and they do really well financially well tell me what you think of this idea in Estonia I'm told the government there apparently subsidizes all the students who go into high demand areas but if you want to study in other areas where the labor market is not so interested no such luck should we do that well it's that's a really interesting question what they actually do there is a little bit different what you said more or less what you said but they also decide that the country needs 25 historians it doesn't need 125 so if you're the 26 to 25 best high school graduates who want to study history get in your the 26 then you really want to study history you pay the full rate right so it's a bit like an international student and we begin it would be in Canada and and what they're trying to do is to balance these things off here's the problem universities governments are not very good about deciding where the future job market is going to be if you watch the mismatch between the production of teachers and the number of jobs in the teaching profession it's almost always out of whack they have problems with nursing and whatever else so would you feel confident enough as a very well-educated observer of Ontario to tell me where six to seven years from now the primary job market is going to be in this problem nobody knows and so it's in one sense it's easy to say that because but five years ago we would have been telling everybody please be a mining engineer and you know a mining engineer be a petroleum engineer there's gonna need lots and lots and lots of jobs and there are not lots and lots of jobs and what the people who were in for five years now are still getting coming through the system when the economy when they said it though it was true at that moment the people who graduated then yeah and so the problem is in the economy that's changing so fast this is a main argument we're making here is in the book is that is that the transitions that are occurring are so dramatic we're seeing almost every part of our economy change we're gonna start seeing autonomous mining in this country we have autonomous trucks that are being used in Fort McMurray and and British Columbia we're seeing drones that are replacing people who are doing prospecting you know Northern Ontario prospecting is a big part of the economy up there you hire lots of people are lots of unskilled people to go into the workforce so my my sense of the real challenge and this is where parents panic is that we are losing the jobs for people of average ability and below average ability we had a lot of jobs in our economy people who worked in factories they were putting rivets in cars right and they did a really honorable job and they were hard-working and dependable and they did their honest day's work every day a lot of those jobs are disappeared the forestries lost thousands of jobs right mining is about to lose a whole bunch of jobs for people of low and below-average ability so what are we creating but computer programmer jobs right be an animator work in virtual reality these are fabulous fields I love them and there's lots of opportunities there right but they aren't the same people the ones who are many of the ones who are going off and working in sort of you know labor type positions you know routine type positions you cannot take somebody who previously would have dropped on in grade 10 and gone work for the GM plant you can't necessarily take them and convert them into a computer programmer those are very different skills where I'd it requiring very different abilities and that I think is one of our fundamental challenges finally can be why the global accountancy firm I guess the use to call her and send young one of Britain's biggest graduate recruiters they announced last year that they're no longer going to be considering university degrees when assessing potential employees they're gonna use an in-house assessment program numeracy tests literacy tests as a way to assess applicants if you're in the university business if you're in the business of pumping out graduates how should you take that news you should be really scared because it's happening all over the place there's a bunch of American companies it works better with large companies one of the American companies you're doing is they're saying we got a competition we got ten ten jobs at $300,000 a year anybody can apply there's no academic requirements at all they do psychological testing aptitude testing they bring them in they give them an intensive work work training sort of program maybe two months or something like that and they all start $100,000 one person has a PhD in chemistry there's a great ten drop up and they're working side by side earning the same amount of money I mean the part of the reality is that we've lost the capacity to count on the University certificate and credential to mean something specific for a job for well for life it used to mean really hard worker dependable reliable you know no complaining etc etc it meant that they they could write and write well it meant that they could read and read well they could do research they can think creatively and now I guarantee you I can show you thousands of Canadian graduates who have all of those credentials and I can show you a bunch of other ones with exactly the same degree exactly the same credential don't write very well can't do the mathematics very well aren't very good creative thinkers so I think when quite frankly there's happening in Asia a lot already in Japan in Britain in Korea in particular why would you go back to the University degree as being that guarantor of certain qualities and skills and abilities when you have really simple systems basically they're computer-based sighted psychological tests and aptitude tests you've got a really simple system that can find a brilliant student who's 17 years old I predicted in 10 years from now some of the most advanced companies in Canada be recruiting out of high school they'll go back into grade 11 and 12 and find the kids they want they'll bring them into the into their employment and they'll train them even getting a university degree while they work how will those kids become good citizens because those companies aren't going to turn them into good citizens I think a university does that for them I think the university can do that for them I wish I wish I was as confident as you I wish I had seen as much of that the brilliant students I'll say again are brilliant right but does that guarantee them I don't think so you know it's a terrible thing to do in part was unfair but you know there's a fair number of university graduates supporting Donald Trump in the United States and does that the university education is supposed to give you the ability to think critically and think wisely and I think in the national interest I don't see a match there so I'm not as optimistic on that particular side and I think if you go back to it you'll discover that a lot of that citizenship is created by families next time you come here we're gonna make you Emperor of the post-secondary system in Canada and you will tell us how when you wave your magic wand you're gonna fix all of this that's Ken Coates Canada Research Chair in regional innovation at the University of Saskatchewan and he's the co-author of dream factories why universities won't solve the youth jobs crisis thanks Ken more than welcome helped EVO create a better world through the power of learning visit t v-- org and make a tax-deductible donation today

Channel: The Agenda with Steve Paikin

Views: 8,397

Rating: 4.7910447 out of 5

Keywords: TVO, TVOntario, The Agenda with Steve Paikin, current affairs, analysis, debate, politics, policy, education, universities, labour

Id: 5w-DpkvAo-k

Length: 27min 12sec (1632 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 09 2016