Editor’s Note: James Côté is a full professor in the department of sociology at the University of Western Ontario, in London, Ontario, Canada, where he has taught since the early 1980s. He is co-author (with Anton L. Allahar) of the book Ivory Tower Blues: A University System in Crisis (University of Toronto Press, 2007).
While researching my recent book – Ivory Tower Blues: A University System in Crisis – and taking it through the review process, I have witnessed firsthand massive denial of the fact that our university system has problems rivaling those found in the United States. Yet we share with the United States the twin problems of grade inflation and students’ academic disengagement. We also face a third problem – university graduate underemployment, which has been well documented in Canada.
Grade inflation in the United States, especially in Ivy League schools, has received a considerable amount of press for some time. More recently, the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) studies have highlighted academic disengagement. The NSSE studies measure the demands placed on students, and the effort they expend, through annual surveys with students themselves. In both Canada and the U.S., the NSSE results show that only about 10 percent of students do the level of work that professors think is necessary to be proficient in the subjects they teach.
When these studies were first conducted in Canada a few years ago, the results proved such an embarrassment for the eight participating Canadian universities that they tried to bury the results. At my own university, administrators denied me access to our institution’s results until my request was brought up at the University Senate. Even then, it took me two years to get full disclosure. Eventually, after the province of Ontario mandated that all universities participate in the NSSE beginning in 2006, I was able to piece together a comparative picture of Canadian and American universities: Canadian universities have slightly lower grade inflation but slightly higher student disengagement.
Disengaged Students, Inflated Grades
Administrators tried to explain the disengagement results by the lower level of funding here – a 40 percent difference from the U.S. in funding per student, largely as a result of two decades of cutbacks at the same time that enrollments doubled. This reasoning may explain some of the Canadian-American difference in engagement, but it does not explain the low levels of engagement in both countries.
In spite of their failure to do a serious level of work, students receive extremely high grades in both Canada and the United States. According to the NSSE, about 80 percent of first-year students and 90 percent of fourth-year students in Canada report regularly being awarded As and Bs. In equivalent U.S. schools, the figures are even higher — 90 percent and 94 percent. (I was able to correlate these NSSE results with official institutional statistics from a couple of Canadian schools, and the self-reported NSSE figures are only about 10 percent higher than those institutional statistics.) Unfortunately, most people, including younger teachers and administrators who went through the system as grades rose and demands fell, appear to be unaware of the deterioration of standards.
The current system of grading seems to have developed as an attempt to keep students in school. But grade inflation is bad for bright students who aren’t challenged and therefore do not develop their intellectual potential. It is also bad for less capable students because they are given higher marks than they deserve and are not encouraged to improve. Many simply drift through the educational system and into the workforce without building or maximizing their intellectual potential.
To get a grip on the grade inflation problem, I recommend the European Credit Transfer System as a point of reference. Originally created to coordinate student exchange programmes among institutions in some thirty countries it is now used by thousands of universities. It allows them to convert grades to a common, non-inflated standard. In this sensible system, As are awarded for outstanding performances (about 10 percent of cases), Bs are given for performances that are very good with few errors (about 25 percent), Cs go to good work that is generally sound with notable errors, and Ds or less are awarded to work with significant shortcomings. Excellence is rewarded and those who need to improve receive appropriate feedback.
Underemployed College Graduates
Academic disengagement is likely to exacerbate the third problem in this crisis – graduate underemployment – a problem that is well researched in Canada (although the research has not had much impact on the policy of encouraging greater numbers to attend universities). Some underemployment is structural in the sense that there are simply not enough jobs for our university graduates. In the 1990s, according to Statistics Canada, our universities produced some 1.2 million grads, but during that decade only about 600,000 jobs were created that required that level of credential. In fact, some one-third of Canada’s university graduates now work in low-skilled jobs.
Currently, we have about one million students in the system. If the job creation pace of the 1990s remains the same, we will have several hundred thousand grads each year pursuing fewer than 100,000 job openings. While these university graduates are likely to be employed, many of the jobs they get will require lower levels of education. This leaves hapless high school and community college graduates in an even worse predicament than was the case before so many young people were encouraged to go to college. This predicament is referred to as the “downward cascading effect” of credential over-production.
Some underemployment is individual, rather than structural, created by students who drift through secondary schools and universities with little required of them. These graduates have not acquired the types of human capital skills that are believed to stimulate economic productivity and growth.
What Counts as “Higher Education”?
Finally, I should point out that what constitutes “post-secondary” needs to be examined. Canada has claimed to have more post-secondary graduates than many other countries such as the U.S. Based on its 2001 census, Canada claimed that among 25-34 year olds, 28 percent had university-level qualifications and an additional 21 percent had community college diplomas. These high rates were achieved in the 1990s, with trade, college, and university credentials increasing by 39 percent among those aged 25 and over (this segment of the general population grew by only 14 percent). University graduates accounted for about half of this increase, followed by community college graduates (about 40 percent) and then those in the trades (10 percent).
Including the trades as post-secondary is technically accurate, but implying that they constitute “higher” education is misleading, especially given the fact that many European countries provide such training as part of their secondary systems. Similarly, counting Canada’s community colleges as “higher” education is deceptive. In most provinces, Canadian universities do not recognize community college credits, for good reason. Most community colleges do not provide degrees like the U.S. associate’s degree, which can become the basis of the bachelor’s degree. In Europe, the curriculum equivalent to Canada’s community colleges is provided in secondary schools. In short, to get a true idea of how many “higher” educational graduates we actually produce, I recommend dividing Canada’s official statistics in half.
Criticizing educational systems is not popular, especially at the post-secondary level. Most Canadians have heard only good-news stories about Canada being a world leader in producing higher educational graduates, and how well these graduates are doing. This view is sustainable only if one is shielded from the facts. If we are content to watch our post-secondary systems become equivalent to secondary systems in terms of standards, that is one thing. But let’s not fool ourselves about what we are doing to our young people and to our societies.