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We've long taken for granted that Canadian universities are among the very best in the world, and we've often rather smugly assumed that our Canadian bachelor degrees are, on the whole, better than their American counterparts. But are these things true? There's room for doubt: Both the contents and the format of our degree programs leave much to be desired.

A university program's quality depends upon many factors, including the amount of instructional time, the calibre of the professors, and course content. It's impossible to do justice to all of these in one column, so here I'll concentrate on just one: instructional time. An analysis of comparative instructional hours between Canadian and American universities yields some rather humbling results.

In a typical American undergraduate course (e.g. English, sociology), the class meets for three hours per week for one semester. This earns the student three "semester-hours." To earn a degree at virtually any university, an American student must meet the unofficial national standard of 120 semester-hours, i.e. must accumulate the equivalent of 40 such courses. That amounts to five courses per semester, taken for eight semesters, i.e. for four years. Sound familiar? It should. It's exactly what's required for a four-year degree at most Canadian universities. So, on the face of it, it seems Canadian and American students get the same number of instructional hours. In fact, they don't.

Total instructional hours depend not only on the number of courses, and the hours per week for each course, but also on the length of each course in weeks - and here there is a striking difference between the American system and ours.

The typical American academic year is a 30-week term, divided into three 10-week trimesters (as, for example, at the University of Chicago), or more commonly, into two 15-week semesters (as at most four-year colleges and universities). To squeeze in a 30-week year in two semesters, American schools often start their classes in late August and don't finish until the end of April; exams aren't held until May. To be sure, not every American school holds to the 30-week standard; some have 29-week, 28-week, or 26-week academic years. But the average is still something like 28 or 29 weeks per academic year.

In contrast, most Canadian universities (e.g., Dalhousie, University of Victoria, McMaster, University of Manitoba) have a 26-week academic year, usually divided into two 13-week semesters. Classes don't start until after Labour Day and finish by early April; exams are over by May. Further, whereas 26 weeks is the lower bound for American universities, it's the upper bound for Canadian ones. Some Canadian schools have only 25 weeks (e.g. University of New Brunswick) or even 24 weeks (e.g. University of Alberta, Memorial University of Newfoundland). Thus, the average Canadian university year is somewhere around 25 weeks. This is three to four weeks shorter than the average American university year. When you add up this annual difference over four years, you come up about 12 to 16 weeks short, i.e. roughly the equivalent of one Canadian semester. This means that, over the course of a four-year degree, the average American student enjoys the equivalent of nine Canadian semesters of instructional time, whereas our students get only eight.

In terms of volume, this means American students can cover about 12 per cent more material. Is this significant? Yes, it is, especially in programs where the subject matter is cumulative, e.g. languages, mathematics and science.

As I found out from experience, it's impossible to teach the grammar of biblical Greek in 26 weeks; you simply can't go fast enough, and you never get to the last few chapters of the textbook. Students thus start Year 2 expected to jump right into reading actual passages, when they don't yet have the fundamentals of the language. The instructor has to adjust Year 2 expectations downward in order to compensate. Similarly, it's obvious that the Year 2 calculus instructor will have to start at a lower level if his students have been shorted a month in instructional time.

Admittedly, instructional hours are only one aspect of a university education. Still, the fact is that American educators put their students through the paces for longer than we do, and cover more ground. This should prick the balloon of our complacency. Maybe we should consider lengthening the instructional year at our universities, in order to keep up with those allegedly inferior Americans.

Cameron Wybrow has more than 25 years experience teaching at several Ontario universities and colleges.