Sorry for ghosting on the thread and I appreciate the quality of discussion that has taken place here.
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Originally Posted by Dr Awesomesauce
So let's assume university is free...
*Is it fair to dump this on an already over-taxed citizen? What's the data? What's the business case for it?
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- In terms of the data and business case, an empirical study would have to be undertaken and a survey of existing cases would need to be conducted. I don't have the data or business case, so admittedly this is higher-level discussion that, if we were serious about considering implementing, would warrant an investigation by the government and other relevant experts.
- Not sure if I would consider Canadians to be over-taxed, but I think it would have to be viewed as a long-term investment, and the fruits of that investment shouldn't only be measured monetarily. For citizens, I think the rewards of investing in public education are pretty clear and many countries provide this, although of course it is not without disagreement. For foreign nationals, we would be giving up international tuition fees, thereby helping recruit the most qualified foreign nationals on the basis of merit rather than on the basis of how loaded their parents are. This would likely mean that a greater percentage of international students will come from poorer countries, and countries (including Canada) tend to retain more international students from poor source countries rather than rich ones. I can pull up data on this if you'd like. I suspect that whether one's parents are rich will also affect retention rates, but do not have data.
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Originally Posted by Dr Awesomesauce
*Should all programs be free? I.e. Should we be paying for BAs in Women's Studies, Sociology, Anthropology, etc.? Or should we fund only programs that are in demand from an employment perspective?
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- That's a good question and I'm interested in your thoughts. At a higher and perhaps philosophical level, I'm not pleased with university programs turning into job training centers. I'm not sure if short-term post-graduation employment metrics should be used as a way to evaluate the value of education. The emphasis on standardized testing and turning universities into job training centers has, I think understandably, turned many away from education and the desire to learn and think critically. The wave of anti-intellectualism and populism is not surprising. And with how the economy continues to rapidly change, our focus I think should be on inculcating critical thinking skills and then making available job search resources and entrepreneurship resources. I suspect that those kinds of fundamental skills can be inculcated through a variety of programs.
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Originally Posted by Dr Awesomesauce
*Should we raise the bar back where it used to be, ensuring that only those with an inclination towards higher study are accepted?
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- I'm not sure where the bar used to be or where it is now, but I would hope that only those with an inclination are accepted. The point would be to remove money out of the admissions process and make it about merit. Obviously, merit is not easily defined, so there is room for disagreement and discussion, but I think many will agree money shouldn't play a role. This will perhaps naturally increase the competitiveness of university admissions.
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Originally Posted by Dr Awesomesauce
Offering free tuition to high-achieving International Students is a wonderful idea but how do we ensure they stay and contribute? How do we get our share of the pie? We can't do this and then just hope they stick around.
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- Removing money out of the equation will likely mean that the source country composition of our international student pool will shift in the sense that there will likely be more students from poorer countries and poorer families. There's data showing that students from poorer countries stay back in Canada more, understandably. I can pull up some of that data if you'd like. I don't have data on whether people from poorer families tend to stay back in Canada more, but I would suspect it can help retention. Right now, we get a lot of rich kids from rich families who are simply coming here for the experience and respectable foreign degree, then go back home to work in their family business empire. The system isn't designed well for retention.
- We can also study other approaches to enhancing retention. A soft approach could be requiring international students who seek tuition relief to submit a personal statement and attend an admissions interview to help evaluate the student's desire (or lack thereof) to remain in Canada for at least a few years after graduation. This can be incorporated into the admissions process. A more hard-line approach may be to temporarily suspend the payment of tuition and, if the student does not make a good faith effort to secure qualifying employment, then the tuition fees will be due and payable.
- The retention question is also a bit of a chicken-or-the-egg situation, and I think there's parallels to immigration in general. At the heart of it, what really affects retention? It's the quality of the host country, simple as that. If the host country provides excellent opportunities, safety, basic rights, etc., people will want to stay there. We need to focus on the many that will stay behind and help develop our economic clusters. And the continued development of these economic clusters will further boost retention. The numbers might not be immediately pretty, but I think it can snowball into more. This is a bit tangential, but when you look at the retention of immigrants in general, you kind of see this too. I would guess, for example, that immigration retention has increased over time in a place like Winnipeg. Maybe only few stayed back from the initial waves of immigrants, but successive waves are able to build on social and other capital held by the few who stayed back.
- Bottom line is that retention (absent regulations like conditioned tuition relief) is a function of how attractive the host country is. And I think the ones who stay back will contribute to making Canada a more attractive destination, which lead to future waves of international students being more easily retainable.
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Originally Posted by Dr Awesomesauce
And it's been my experience that universities are not great economic engines, as such. Yes, they contribute something to the economy, it's true, but they're also bloated, bureaucratic and sometimes ideological. They're businesses in a sense, yes, but not innovative or well-run as far as I can tell.
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Universities in a vacuum don't seem like economic engines, but when they're successfully integrated into economic clusters, they can serve as a pillar for the success of the economic cluster. There's a lot of literature about the importance of economic clusters. Perhaps one of the closest examples we have in Canada is Kitchener-Waterloo.