When the Canadian University Report survey was introduced a decade ago, it was not to universal acclaim from the universities themselves. A major criticism at the outset was the sample selection process, which involved finding students from each school via a scholarships website database. Over time, we worked to address this criticism by working with institutions to get a better sample of their students directly through their own databases. Now, close to 95% of our sample comes through such partnerships.
Another criticism was that student views on institutional services weren’t valid, many said, as they had no idea what was available at any school other than their own. That’s true to some extent—but if year after year a particular institution gets results which are particularly good or particularly bad compared to other institutions of its type, then the results start to gain in validity. And so it has proved—CUR results are highly reliable, year-on-year, and schools that have invested heavily in the student experience (hello, Western!) have been consistently rewarded accordingly
A final criticism was that institution-wide rankings were too broad to be useful, given how much of the student experience is specific to an individual program or faculty. That’s a fair point, so last year, armed with the much larger survey samples available to us from our partnership with institutions, we began publishing some results by field of study.
Though some schools have risen and others fallen over time, overall, students report being mostly satisfied with their institutions. There are differences, of course, notably that students at smaller schools tend to report much higher levels of satisfaction than students at larger ones. That’s something that most sociological theory would have predicted—people like feeling like “connected insiders”, and that’s much easier to achieve at small schools than at big ones—but even controlling for size, there are some significant differences between institutions. That’s one of the reasons we portray schools by size; to better show institutions against their real peers.
Of course, small schools don’t have everything their own way. When it comes to things like teaching, school spirit and (for reasons we don’t completely understand) campus buildings and facilities, they have a clear advantage over their larger brethren. But when it comes to things like information technology and career preparation, small schools lose their advantage, as students give all institutions relatively low marks on those fronts. And, interestingly, the aspects of student life with which students express the most dissatisfaction—the availability of jobs and affordable housing—are the ones over which institutions have almost no control.
One piece of good news from this year’s survey, especially if you’re a concerned parent watching a student go off to school for the first time, is that students gave their schools overwhelmingly positive marks for safety and security. Ninety per cent of schools received an A- rating or higher and only one school (York, for fairly obvious reasons) got less than a B+.
Over the ten years of the CUR, there has been a steady shift in the way institutions have reacted to satisfaction surveys. For one thing, institutions have come to see themselves as being in much greater competition with one another for tuition dollars. For another, highly mobile international students become ever more important to university budgets (in case you were wondering, international students tend to rate their schools the same way domestic students do).
The upshot of all this is that universities are listening to their students more than ever before. And comparative report cards like this one are a chance to give pride of place to institutions doing the best jobs of that.
As a result, the schools that come top in these ratings aren’t necessarily the ones with long histories and illustrious alumni. Rather they’re the ones that make their students feel that they are in a modern, nurturing learning environment.
And that’s really what we want from our schools—isn’t it?
Alex Usher is president of Higher Education Strategy Associates
