THE REPORT
Immigrants will represent nearly 100 per cent of net labour market growth in Canada by the year 2011.1 More than ever, employers recognize the need to effectively integrate immigrants into the workplace and they seek solutions to leverage the talents and contributions immigrants bring to the Canadian economy.
From January to March 2009, Colleges Ontario and 12 colleges consulted with employers, ethno-cultural business organizations, business associations and unions to find out their views on employing immigrants and how colleges can support the transition of immigrants to the province’s workforce. Input was obtained through a variety of formats including facilitated round-table discussions, one-on-one dialogues, and an online questionnaire. The purpose of these consultations was to obtain advice from employers on how colleges can better address language needs for the workplace and support immigrant integration.
Colleges engaged in discussions with 218 organizations. These organizations represented a wide cross-section of large, medium and small businesses in five industry sectors that included health care, hospitality, science and technology, construction and manufacturing. Many of these organizations were interested in participating because they understand the valuable role of immigrants in helping companies respond to current labour and consumer market realities.
This report presents the findings from these consultations, offering a snapshot of the experiences of the participants, and outlining some suggestions on how colleges can play an even greater role in effectively integrating immigrants into the workplace.
CONSULTING WITH EMPLOYERS
As part of the Language Skills for the Workplace2 project funded by the federal government, colleges had an opportunity to hold discussions with employers on language needs and immigrant integration. Participants were asked about:
• their experiences in the recruitment, hiring, retention and promotion of immigrants
. training, education and development priorities in the workplace • occupation-specific and workplace-specific language needs
. ways that colleges can effectively help employers in the integration of immigrants
into employment.
Colleges held discussions with their local employer community and Colleges Ontario contacted larger provincewide employers and associations. There were 218 unique organizations that participated: 198 employers, 17 associations and three unions (See Appendix for list of participants). Employers from a broad range of sectors were invited to participate. Approximately 60 per cent of participants were from small- and medium-sized businesses and 40 per cent were large employers (employers with more than 500 employees).
There are about 420 registered private career colleges (PCCs) in Ontario – the number is in constant flux. 60% of schools are ten years of age or younger. They serve 53,000 full time equivalent (FTE) students, or about 1 in 15 Ontario postsecondary students. Their overall vocational revenues are in the order of $360M annually. They are mostly small; 70% have total revenues under $1M and average enrolment is under 200.
The time for meaningful transformation in Ontario’s postsecondary system is now. To meet the needs of the emerging economy, reform must focus on innovation and applied learning that vaults our province ahead of its competition in creating the best-educated, best-prepared workforce in the world. Composed of distinct but equally valued and complementary partners, Ontario’s transformed postsecondary system will ensure that all students can reach their full potential through a broad array of theoretical and applied learning opportunities. Colleges will continue to be student focused, specializing in applied learning that leads to good jobs for graduates, addresses labour market needs and affords access to the broadest possible population. Colleges and universities will offer a range of credentials within their systems and collaborate on a multitude of programs that offer students the best of both. Expanded pathways will give students the opportunity to customize their post-secondary experience to match their interests. Online and blended learning, married to leading-edge technology, will enable students to learn anywhere, anytime, and in ways best suited to their learning styles. Students will be better prepared than ever before to meet the demands of the economy, and they will achieve their goals faster and at less cost.
Survey fielded between August 16-28, 2013 among a nationally representative sample of American adults (N = 1,000) conducted via landline and cell phone. The margin of error for a sample of 1,000 is ±3.1%.
The national poll was supplemented by a survey of business hiring decision-makers (N = 263) fielded online during July 10-15, 2013. The business elite sample included hiring decision-makers and hiring executives from a cross-section of companies, ranging from small companies to larger businesses with a global presence.
Canada’s universities develop globally aware graduates with the internationally competitive skills suited to the jobs of today and tomorrow, while fostering globally connected research and scholarship. Results from a new survey by Universities Canada highlight how universities across the country are highly engaged in and committed to internationalization – and where there is room for improvement.
Mismatches between workers’ competences and what is required by their job are widespread in OECD countries. Studies that use qualifications as proxies for competences suggest that as many as one in four workers could be over-qualified and as many as one in three could be under-qualified for their job. However, there is significant variation across countries and socio-demographic groups. Our meta-analysis of country studies suggests that over 35% of workers are over-qualified in Sweden compared with just 10% in Finland, with most other OECD countries located between these two extremes. There is also extensive evidence that youth are more likely to be over-qualified than their older counterparts and the same is found to be true for immigrant workers compared with a country’s nationals. On the other hand, no definitive evidence has been found of the persistence of qualification mismatch, with some papers showing that over-qualification is just a temporary phenomenon that most workers overcome through career mobility and others finding infrequent trantisions between over-qualification and good job matches. Across the board, over-qualified workers are found to earn less than their equally-qualified and well-matched counterparts but more than appropriately-qualified workers doing the same job. Under-qualified workers are found to earn
more than their equally-qualified and well-matched counterparts but less than appropriately-qualified workers doing the same job. Over-qualified workers are also found to be less satisfied about their job and more likely to leave their work than well-matched workers with the same qualifications.
This report compares eligibility for student financial aid by examining the amount of funds (both repayable and non-repayable) that a student would be eligible to receive in each province, based on their income group (low-, middle- and high-income). Provincial administration of part (or all) of financial aid has resulted in great variability in the type, quantity, and availability of resources offered to students. Individual provinces have demonstrated priorities such as debt reduction strategies, universal grants, and student independence from parental support, to name a few.
Key findings include that:
• The combination of federal, provincial and joint administered student financial aid programs are inherently complex, lack transparency, and thus, remain removed from public scrutiny and discussion.
• Appalling inequities exist in the amount of resources offered to students, based on their province of residence.
• Enormous differences in tuition between provinces are the greatest factor in determining the cost of education and therefore have a great impact on the amount of debt a student may accumulate.
• Provincial grant programs, whether needs-based or universal, are the largest contributor to debt reduction.
Education PLUS is the hidden dividend that learners come to acquire if they are educated in what we call the new pedagogies ‐ powerful new learning modes steeped in real world problem solving now made more telling through recent, rapid developments in the use of technology for interactive learning.
We can and will define the core learning outcomes as the ‘Six Cs of Deep Learning’, but we first must understand the existential essence of this new human being. It is no exaggeration to say that the new pedagogies have the potential to support a fundamental transformation in human evolution. The result is that action, reflection, learning and living can now become one and the same. This seamless ‘ecology’ of life and learning occurs during what we used to know as formal schooling, post‐secondary and higher education, but then continues throughout life. In this model, learning, doing, knowing, adapting, inventing and living become practically indistinguishable. Although we offer here a philosophical note on Education PLUS we are deeply involved with practitioners around the world in doing this new work of learning on an increasingly large and deep scale. The
developments we describe are happening in real time, and we predict will take off in the immediate future.
Undergraduate college student borrowing has risen dramatically in recent years. Graduates who received a bachelor’s degree in 20081 borrowed 50% more (in inflation-adjusted dollars) than their counterparts who graduated in 1996, while graduates who earned an associate’s degree or undergraduate certificate in 2008 borrowed more than twice what their counterparts in 1996 had borrowed, according to a new analysis of National Center for Education Statistics data by the Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends project.
Increased borrowing by college students has been driven by three trends:
ï‚· More college students are borrowing. In 2008, 60% of all graduates had borrowed, compared with about half (52%) in 1996.
- College students are borrowing more. Among 2008 graduates who borrowed, the average loan for bachelor’s degree recipients was more than $23,000, compared with slightly more than $17,000 in 1996. For associate’s degree and certificate recipients, the average loan increased to more than $12,600 from about $7,600 (all figures in 2008 dollars).
- More college students are attending private for-profit schools, where levels and rates of borrowing are highest. Over the past decade, the private for-profit sector has expanded more rapidly than either the public or private not-for-profit sectors. In 2008, these institutions granted 18% of all undergraduate awards, up from 14% in 2003.2 Students who attend for-profit colleges are more likely than other students to borrow, and they typically borrow larger amounts.
Other key findings from the Pew Research analysis:
- One-quarter (24%) of 2008 bachelor’s degree graduates at for-profit schools borrowed more than $40,000, compared with 5% of graduates at public institutions and 14% at not-for-profit schools.
- Roughly one-in-four recipients of an associate’s degree or certificate borrowed more than $20,000 at both private for-profit and private not-for-profit schools, compared with 5% of graduates of public schools.
- Graduates of private for-profit schools are demographically different from graduates in other sectors. Generally, private for-profit school graduates have lower incomes, and are older, more likely to be from minority groups, more likely to be female, more likely to be independent of their parents and more likely to have their own dependants.
ACT defines readiness for college as acquisition of the knowledge and skills a student needs to enroll and succeed in credit-bearing, first-year courses at a postsecondary institution, such as a two- or four-year college, trade school, or technical school.
Simply stated, readiness for college means not needing to take remedial courses in college.
Today, college readiness also means career readiness. While not every high school graduate plans to attend college, the majority of the fastest-growing jobs that require a high school diploma, pay a salary above the poverty line for a family of four, and provide opportunities for career advancement require knowledge and skills comparable to those expected of
the first-year college student (ACT, 2006b). We must therefore educate all high school students according to a common academic expectation, one that prepares them for both postsecondary education and the workforce. Anything less will not give high school graduates the foundation of academic skills they will need to learn additional skills as their jobs change or
as they change jobs throughout their careers.
Partnerships between Ontario colleges and universities have become increasingly important recently for at least two
reasons. Partnerships are encouraged generally in Canada, USA, Europe and elsewhere to transcend organizational boundaries, foster synergies and stimulate change. So universities are enjoined to partner with employers to integrate education and work, with industry to foster innovation and with other universities to avoid duplication.
This paper examines the relationship between individuals’ personal exposure to economic conditions and their investment choices in the context of human capital. Focusing on bachelor’s degree recipients, we find that birth cohorts exposed to higher unemployment rates during typical schooling years select majors that earn higher wages, that have better employment prospects, and that more often lead to work in a related field. Much of this switching behavior can be considered a rational response to differences in particular majors’ labor market prospects during a recession. However, higher unemployment leads to other meaningful changes in the distribution of majors. Conditional on changes in lifetime expected earnings, recessions encourage women to enter male-dominated fields, and students of both genders pursue more difficult majors, such as STEM
fields. These findings imply that the economic environment changes how students select majors, possibly by encouraging them to consider a broader range of possible degree fields. Finally, in the absence of this compensating behavior, we estimate that the average estimated costs of graduating in a recession would be roughly ten percent larger.
The reasons why students need to be involved and engaged when they attend college are well established. Engagement can be the difference between completing a degree and dropping out. Research has sought to identify what makes student involvement more likely. Factors like student-faculty interaction, active and collaborative learning experiences, involvement in extracurricular activities, and living on campus have all been shown to make a difference. Not surprisingly, faculty play a critical role in student engagement … from the obvious: facilitating discussions in the classroom; to the often overlooked: maximizing those brief encounters we have with students outside of class. This special report features 15 articles that provide perspectives and advice for keeping students actively engaged in learning activities while fostering more meaningful interactions between students and faculty members, and among the students themselves.
For example, in “Student Engagement: Trade-offs and Payoffs” author E Shelley Reid, associate professor at George Mason University, talks about how to craft engagement-focused questions rather than knowledge questions, and explains her willingness to take chances in ceding some control over students’ learning.
In “The Truly Participatory Seminar” authors Sarah M. Leupen and Edward H. Burtt, Jr., of Ohio Wesleyan University, outline their solution for ensuring all students in their upper division seminar course participate in discussion at some level.
In “Reminders for Improving Classroom Discussion” Roben Torosyan, associate director of the Center for Academic Excellence at Fairfield University, offers very specific advice on balancing student voices, reframing discussions, and probing below the surface of group discussions.
And finally, in “Living for the Light Bulb” authors Aaron J. Nurick and David H. Carhart of Bentley College provide tips on setting the stage for that delightful time in class “when the student’s entire body says ‘Aha! Now I see it!’” Who wouldn’t like to see more light bulbs going on more often? One of the most challenging tasks instructors face is keeping students engaged. Building Student Engagement: 15 Strategies for the College Classroom will help you meet that challenge while ensuring your classroom is a positive and productive learning environment.
Is it just that time of the semester, or are academics more and more stressed out? In the past week alone, I’ve talked with:
-A colleague emotionally reeling from counseling two students who each had a parent die this semester.
-Another unsettled colleague who received an expletive-filled email from an angry student demanding to "speak to your supervisor."
-A friend at another institution buried under a mountain of papers — the product of a fourth course that he’s teaching on overload to make a little extra money.
With a population of 13 million people, the province of Ontario covers a significant geographic distribution of 917,741 square kilometres (Statistics Canada, 2005). Fourteen per cent of the population is categorized as living in a rural, remote or northern area (Statistics Canada, 2011). Within this land mass is a rich diversity of people, systems and institutions that are privileged to call it home - including Francophone persons and First Nations, Inuit and Métis people. There are unique challenges that exist within these communities that affect access to health services: geographic distance, socioeconomic status, availability of health human resources and infrastructure. These factors have an impact on health status, wellness and the ability to
offer person-centred health care.
Over the last few decades there has been a great deal of ink spilled about the importance of postsecondary education (PSE) in Canada and globally. We are moving from a mid-20th century idea of postsecondary education as “elite†to a new understanding of “mass†postsecondary education (Trow, 1974), and potentially to a newer view of postsecondary education as “universal.†The growing consensus is that postsecondary education is important to society, in providing the skills workers require in the labour market, in supporting the social and economic health of society, and in ensuring individuals have the necessary abilities to participate and contribute fully in that society and labour market. What once was accepted as the luxury of the upper and middle classes is now understood to be a prerequisite for full inclusion in the benefits and functioning of society.
As PSE in Ontario grows to “universal†proportions and beyond, youth from low-income backgrounds stand to gain in terms of their socio-economic status. Nevertheless,potential students from low-income backgrounds continue to take up postsecondary education with less frequency than their middle- and high-income counterparts, particularly at the university level (Drolet ,2005; de Broucker, 2005; Berger, Motte and Parkin, 2009; HEQCO, 2010). Income is an important determinant of participation in PSE. Knowing this, the public policy response has long been a focus on keeping tuition relatively low and providing student assistance to students who demonstrate need. However, recent research has revealed that income alone is not as strong a determinant as academic achievement or parental education (Drolet, 2005; Frenette, 2008a; Finnie, Childs and Wismer, 2010).
Characteristics often associated with income make the barriers to postsecondary more complex and multi-faceted. Furthermore, it has also been shown that changes to student assistance and tuition levels over time have had very little effect on the participation of the lowest income quartile (Berger et al., 2009); meaning that other policy levers may be required to address the complexity of the barriers in a more sophisticated way.
This is the first in a series of @ Issue Papers that looks at the participation of traditionally under-represented cohorts in postsecondary education.1 The purpose of this @ Issue Paper is to summarize what is currently known about the participation of low-income students in PSE, with a particular emphasis on low-income students in Ontario. Where relevant data or research is not available for Ontario, the discussion will focus on the larger Canadian picture.
One of the important questions to consider in a review of policy for postsecondary education is what kind o f system do we need. To provide a reasonably complete answer to that question would require addressing many different dimensions of postsecondary education including structures, processes, and relationships. In this paper, I will concentrate on two important and closely related subsidiary questions within the broader question of what kind of system we need. Those subsidiary questions are what is the most appropriate mix of different types of postsecondary institutions, and what should be their relationships with one another?1 As those are pretty large questions, within them my principal focus will be even narrower, on the balance and relationship between universities and community colleges.
This scoping study was conducted as part of a boarder study funded by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council Fellowship (ALTC) on Building Leadership Capacity for Undergraduate Students. The present scoping study is phase one of the project (see aim below).
Before outlining the current study, it is important to briefly summarise the literature on leadership development and theories.
Background information: Literature on leadership development and theories
Since the late 1970s scholars have criticized the traditional theories of leadership (e.g., Greenleaf, 1991). From the literature (see reports from Anderson & Johnson, 2006; Marshall, 2008), these more traditional theories include: personality theories (which propose that leadership depends on traits that are either inherited or emerge in early life development), trait theory (which involves the assumption that there are characteristics for leadership deeply embedded in the personalities of leaders), and finally theories of power and influence (which assume that leaders are people in positions of formal responsibility within an organization).
Despite Canada having one of the world’s best-educated populations, numerous rationales have been presented to support the continued expansion and broadening of participation in post-secondary education (PSE). Not only do recent federal and provincial occupational projections suggest that future jobs will overwhelmingly require candidates with some form of PSE, the evidence on earnings premiums and private rates of return to PSE provide some indications that the labour market can still absorb large quantities of PSE graduates. Provinces have made higher PSE attainment a priority — for example, in the most recent Ontario budget, the government set as one of its goals to increase the PSE attainment rate from 62 per cent to
70 per cent (Ontario Ministry of Finance, 2010).
Yet, demographic trends suggest that maintaining, let alone increasing, the number of postsecondary graduates in coming years will prove challenging. Though there are currently supplyside constraints in some regions (principally urban Ontario), within 20 years, the pool of postsecondary- aged Canadians will be substantially shallower than it is today. To keep the supply of skilled workers at current levels, participation rates will have to keep climbing. As participation rates are already quite high among economically advantaged segments of the population, there is growing consensus that the best opportunity for growth in participation rates may be among groups that are currently under-represented in PSE, such as students from low-income families, students with no history of post-secondary education in their families and Aboriginal students. A strong case can be made as well that governments and PSE institutions should strive to close the gap in participation rates between under-represented groups and the rest of the population on the grounds that all Canadians should be provided with the same chances and opportunities to engage in PSE studies, independently of their socio-economic background. In short, increasing the participation rates of disadvantaged populations is an objective worth pursuing from both an efficiency and equity perspective.
The main objective of this report is to learn about the state of knowledge regarding the role of financial literacy as a complex barrier to postsecondary attendance. To achieve this goal, the report contains a literature review of existing studies in the area, as well as an environmental scan of existing programs and initiatives.
When possible, the focus of the report is on low-income high school students in the context of making decisions regarding postsecondary education. In this ideal setting, financial literacy will be defined as knowledge of all the costs, benefits, and available aid associated with postsecondary education. In reality, there are few studies and existing programs that fit this ideal profile. However, we have identified several studies that share these characteristics to a large extent. Specifically, we describe and discuss 21 related studies and 34 related programs. Although most studies and programs are Canadian, we also broaden the scope somewhat to include countries with similar postsecondary systems as Canada (e.g. the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand).
Our literature review focuses on Canadian and American evidence, and has uncovered several important findings. First, the cost of a postsecondary education is vastly overestimated by the public at large and by low-income youth in particular. In contrast, the economic benefits to attending university are generally underestimated (equally for low- and high-income households). Whether knowing about the costs and benefits matters for pursuing a postsecondary education is less clear given the lack of convincing evidence in this area.
While awareness of student financial aid is not necessarily an issue, it appears that knowledge of aid is limited. This may be related to the complexity of student financial aid, which is not only costly, but may also represent a barrier to some students.
A non-negligible portion of students are loan averse, which means that they will avoid grant opportunities when they are coupled with an optional student loan. This is the case even though the loans can be refused or invested at zero repayable interest.
Research also demonstrates that helping students complete their financial aid and postsecondary application forms has a large impact on application and admission rates. In contrast, offering information to students (without application assistance) is generally not sufficient to affect behaviour.
Finally, once in university, the majority of undergraduates follow a budget and regularly pay off their credit card balance each month. This suggests a certain degree of awareness and control regarding their finances, which may help them repay their loans on time and avoid defaulting.