Not that long ago, Paul Cappon received a call from the president of one of Canada's leading universities.
The president wanted to congratulate Dr. Cappon on the fine work being done by the Canadian Council on Learning. The CCL is an independent, Ottawa-based think tank on education; Dr. Cappon is its president.
The caller also wanted to enlist Dr. Cappon's support.
The president was hoping that one of the country's leading minds on postsecondary education policy would endorse a drive by a handful of the country's top universities, including McGill and the University of British Columbia, to be given elite standing. And extra funding to compete with the Harvards and Stanfords of the world.
Dr. Cappon's response likely shocked the president. The debate over whether Canada should try to propel a cabal of schools to greatness is a completely sterile one, he said – as are many of the other high-minded discussions taking place within the domain of postsecondary education.
How could there be any discussions about contentious issues such as creating an elite brigade of universities in Canada, Dr. Cappon argued, in the absence of a national strategy on postsecondary education? “How can we possibly deliberate intelligibly on the relative import of research, let alone the potential role of large versus smaller universities,” Dr. Cappon asked his caller, “until there are such objectives, publicly defined and expressed, in our country?”
Of course, he's right. The absence of any countrywide standards for postsecondary education, any pan-national goals and objectives, threatens our academic credentials globally as other countries begin taking decisive action.
Most of Europe began the standards quest years ago. It resulted in the Bologna Process, which makes academic degree principles comparable and compatible throughout most of the European Union. Europe is now developing an independent quality-assurance agency to review whether postsecondary institutions are meeting minimum, agreed-upon markers.
The Australian Universities Quality Agency is already in place. Australia has also developed national standards for qualifications granted by accredited high schools, vocational institutes and universities.
But in Canada, at least when it comes to postsecondary education, we succeed despite ourselves. Our universities do internal quality reviews, but what do they tell us? As Dr. Cappon notes, universities will make information about their schools public if it suits their interests.
In a new report on the issue of quality assurance, the CCL outlines numerous ways our postsecondary institutions could and should be evaluated. How much research money they attract, a favourite tool of measurement for many ranking bodies, is just one yardstick – and, obviously, one that doesn't apply to a broad swath of educational bodies that aren't based on research. The CCL would like to see aggressive surveying of students after they have left university or college to see how well prepared they felt they were for the job market.
Many schools are terrified by this. They feel it's too subjective, and that it might reflect unfairly on faculty members. But how else do we determine whether a school is doing its job? Surely not just by the amount of money it raises. Or its library holdings. Or its faculty-student ratio.
Right now in Canada, a student can't go to an independent source of information and compare universities across the country on a number of criteria. First among them being: How successful have the schools been in meeting clearly defined – not airy fairy – goals and objectives.
Those who oppose national standards often point to the United States and say it doesn't have any national standards either. True. But it does have an accreditation system – a set of measures that universities must meet in order to get the government's all-important stamp of approval.
We don't even have an accreditation system in Canada. Vancouver's Capilano University is so fed up by this, it's trying to get accreditation in the United States.
The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development has already warned Canada that it risks falling down the quality ladder unless it adopts some national levels that are constantly tested – in line with a growing number of other countries. Maybe, like on climate change, the federal government is waiting to be forced into action.
