BC Business
Andy Longhurst is just the kind of student a university dean would love to have on campus. Bright, motivated and discerning, Longhurst started researching his post-secondary plans well before receiving a high-school diploma from the principal at Point Grey Secondary in June 2008. When it was time to start filling out applications last winter, he had already visited campuses, talked to sophomores at the student union lounges, picked the brains of freshmen on Facebook, perused course calendars and read magazine articles and university reviews. With an eye on a future in public and foreign policy, Longhurst astutely focused his search on Ontario universities close to the corridors of national power. “You can read the polls and the Maclean’s magazine ratings, but for me it really came down to how people feel about the school and what kind of community I wanted to be part of,” says Longhurst, a 19-year-old dual Canadian-American citizen, whose family moved from Oregon to Vancouver two years ago for the opportunity of a first-rate Canadian education without the stomach-churning $50,000 tuition. These days budding scholars such as Longhurst have their pick of universities and colleges. Competition among B.C.’s post-secondary institutions to attract the best and brightest is fierce, and in many ways our ivory towers are on shaky foundations. Despite big promises made by the B.C. Liberals in recent years to make the province top dog in the country in post-secondary education, funding is shrinking as our population ages and the pool of high school graduates diminishes. At the same time, a dizzying array of programming is on offer in the education industry, from the traditional, such as a classic liberal arts education, to the obscure, such as the new sports management diploma in surfing studies being developed by North Island College. So as universities grapple with enrolment challenges, it was with some befuddlement that many people observed Premier Gordon Campbell as he waltzed around the Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island last spring with his magic wand, anointing five colleges with full-fledged university designation. Among them are the newly minted Emily Carr University of Art and Design (formerly Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design), Vancouver Island University (Malaspina University-College), Capilano University (Capilano College), Kwantlen Polytechnic University (Kwantlen University-College) and University of the Fraser Valley (University College of the Fraser Valley). “It’s not lost on any of us that the designations came at a time when there were serious budgetary pressures,” says Don Avison, president of the University Presidents’ Council of B.C. (TUPC), over the phone from his office in downtown Victoria. The timing of these announcements was odd, to say the least. While students were cramming for finals last March and Campbell was making his university proclamations, UBC was dealing with an $11.3-million cut to its operating grant, Camosun College was poised to slash 112 already dedicated student seats thanks to a $1.2-million budget cut and New Westminster’s Douglas College was about to take the pruning shears to 14 different programs. In fact, many of the province’s 25-plus universities and colleges were seeing budgetary shortfalls and more and more empty seats in classrooms. It’s not that the new university designations were entirely surprising to educators around the province. In April 2007, the Ministry of Advanced Education and Labour Market Development released its Campus 2020 plan. The report set some lofty goals, including making B.C. one of the top three spenders on basic and applied research by 2010, achieving the highest national level of per capita participation in post-secondary education by 2015 and bringing aboriginal post-secondary rates up to general population levels. To this end, the province promised to add 25,000 new post-secondary seats by 2010, to expand the pool of universities beyond the research-intensive big three of UBC, SFU and UVic, and to include a greater variety of so-called regional “special interest teaching universities.” By a number of benchmarks, the province has a long way to go in meeting the Campus 2020 targets. B.C. ranks last in Canada in per capita university enrolment, with a little under three per cent of our population heading to university. We also have the lowest bachelor degree graduate rate in Canada, with just 25 per cent of 22-year-olds (considered the typical age of first-degree graduation) completing degrees. We also sit in the middle of the pack of Canadian provinces, at sixth, when it comes to trades training. As for the new university designations, TUPC’s Avison calls them nominal in nature. After all, the Emily Carr institute was already a well-established and respected degree-granting institution – in other words, a de facto university. According to the Campus 2020 plan, university colleges cited offshore recruitment as “one of the key reasons” why a name change was necessary. Avison doesn’t buy that argument, pointing to prestigious Ivy League schools such as Dartmouth College and Harvard College, which have no difficulty attracting international tuition dollars. [pagebreak] More important than name changes, according to Avison, is the inadequate regulation of private post-secondary institutions and the impact it has on our ability to recruit foreign scholars. The World Trade University fiasco saw the B.C. Liberals duped by a fast-talking entrepreneur into supporting a private university on the abandoned Canadian Forces base near Chilliwack, but, after three years of hype and grip-and-grin photo ops, the promoters walked away, leaving politicians red-faced. Avison says embarrassments like this, coupled with the dubious dealings of fly-by-night ESL schools, tarnish B.C.’s international reputation and harm efforts to address the challenge of putting bums in seats. While Avison and others are waiting to see whether or not the province will put some meat on the bones of its ambitious Campus 2020 plan, our post-secondary institutions are scrambling for new ways to recruit students. As a testament to how quickly things change in the world of education, one need only read the Campus 2020 introduction by Geoff Plant, the then attorney general who was charged with spearheading the plan. He writes glowingly about touring the province’s educational facilities, which included a visit with eager students at Prince George’s College of New Caledonia studying in a business program futuristically called Business: The Next Generation. Unfortunately, in this case the future proved less than kind. A year after Plant’s visit, the college, with overall enrolment 30 per cent short of target levels, was forced to slay the business program, along with a forest resource and technology program and a slate of university transfer courses. To top it off, the money minders at New Caledonia had to issue 20 layoff notices. So what are universities to do? Drop admission standards, for starters. Over the last 12 months, UBC, SFU and UVic have all attempted to boost enrolment by decreasing entrance requirements. Previously in B.C., aspiring first-year students required a high-school diploma, a pass in English 12 and three other provincial Grade 12 exams. Now they need only a Dogwood in one provincial Grade 12 exam and one of three Grade 12 language course options. “It was something we had to do to help SFU compete for students with U of T, Queen’s, McGill, Waterloo, Dalhousie and Guelph. We were the only universities that required provincial exams to enter university,” says Mehran Kiai, SFU’s director of enrolment services. The optics are strange. Dropping standards to attract more students doesn’t sound like the road to academic excellence. However, Kiai claims that, for some individual SFU programs, academic requirements have actually increased. He also believes reducing general admission standards was essential to put the big B.C. three on an equal recruitment footing with their eastern and central Canadian counterparts. For the last decade or so, a steadily draining pool of high school grads had led to a softening of enrolment at SFU, which in 2003-04 sat at some 22,000 full- and part-time students. However, in recent years the university has begun to meet its targets, largely thanks to aggressive recruitment of foreign and out-of-province coeds. During the 2007-08 academic year, 26,000 students were climbing Burnaby Mountain with their books, cellphones and IPods or commuting to SFU’s downtown campus. Kiai hopes the new relaxed entrance standards will help solidify this upward trend in student numbers. SFU administrators aren’t the only ones preoccupied with enrolment. The prospect of facing empty seats in the classroom and seeing their courses vanish from the calendar has prompted some university professors to also get involved in the recruitment game, albeit in an informal manner. SFU business instructors Andrew Gemino and Drew Parker decided they had to communicate with potential students using the modern parlance of the Internet to help boost enrolment in their information management courses. In 2007 the two professors overhauled course content to make it more relevant to real-life workplace web systems, but enrolment remained sluggish. So when students began making fall 2008 course selections in early July, Gemino and Parker took the battle to cyberspace and launched a series of informative but decidedly tongue-in-cheek YouTube videos imploring students to sign up for their upper-level business classes. It was a technologically appropriate strategy, given that the curriculum they were peddling examines modern data communications and the emerging role that web applications such as Facebook, Wikipedia, Flickr and YouTube play in the world of business. To their admitted surprise, the unconventional recruitment campaign proved to be a hit. “It has been a fun experience, and I am happy to say it seems to have worked. Thousands of people have viewed the site, and our escapades have made it into several newspapers,” says Gemino, adding that enrolment in their courses has more than doubled. “Last year we had difficulty attracting even 10 students into our sessions. This year I have 26 registered so far and Drew [Parker] has over 20.” [pagebreak] Across the Strait of Georgia, a mix of business savvy and educational acumen is helping upstart Royal Roads University (RUU) thrive in a challenging environment. After the federal government decided in 1995 to close the military college, housed on the sprawling Hatley Park National Historic Site in Victoria, the institution made a rapid transition to public university status, welcoming its first students in the fall of 1996. From the outset, the top administrators made it clear that RRU wasn’t going to be what president Allan Cahoon refers to as “just another institution trying to look like all the others.” Instead of offering a standard, broad-based selection of arts and science degrees, RRU puts forward a roster of mostly post-graduate and certificate programs in topics such as conflict analysis and environmental education and communication, areas of study that RRU believes reflect current workplace and societal needs. In turn the curricula and schedules are geared toward mature students already in the workforce, using a mix of in-class seminars and Internet-based study. Indeed, you’d have to be holding down a decent job or willing to assume some student debt to afford a seat in class. Tuition for the MBA program weighs in at a hefty $35,000, or $52,600 for foreign students. Still, classes are filling up. There are now some 3,000 students, a third of whom are non-Canadians, jockeying for study space in aging facilities designed for 300 military cadets, and RRU forecasts the student body to grow to 4,000 by 2012. To accommodate the growth, RRU has embarked on its first major brick-and-mortar expansion since it became public, with two new facilities in the planning and construction phase: the $24-million Learning and Innovation Centre and the $10-million Robert Bateman Art and Environmental Education Centre. Like many institutions, RRU’s future, as per its 2006 strategic plan, calls for continued recruitment of international students, recognizing that “their participation is critical to our understanding of and responsiveness to a global workplace.” Reading between the lines, it’s clear that RRU places a premium on foreign tuition to help sustain its $50-million annual budget. Farther up Vancouver Island, changing demographics keeps North Island College (NIC) president Lou Dryden awake at night. “In the Comox Valley, our population is growing, but it’s growing with older retired people,” says Dryden, who is juggling a $1-million budget deficit while enrolment sits at about 80 per cent of targets. “That means we have to reposition ourselves.” A decade ago, NIC introduced an ElderCollege program, which now has 1,000 students. Soon the number of senior citizen scholars could match the college’s regular full- and part-time student body of 1,300, a shift that puts a new spin on the traditional image of the cap and gown convocation of fresh-faced graduates. While NIC has had to trim some of its traditional university transfer courses, Dryden believes there is a future for a core of classical liberal arts and science courses at the college. Here’s to hoping. The current demand thrust at NIC is clearly for more applied technical and specialized certificates and diplomas. For example, the college is seeing increasing interest for spots in both its licensed practical nurse and long term care aid worker programs – a trend that clearly reflects the aging Comox Valley demographics. Not surprisingly, there’s also a two-year waiting list for the Bachelor of Science in Nursing program. As part of the effort to better align NIC with the needs of its community, Dryden will soon be going to the advanced education ministry with cap in hand seeking approval for two new programs, for dental assistants and retail pharmacy assistants. Trade programs are also booming. Five years ago, the college had 100 apprentices; now there are 500 enrolled in electrical, welding, automotive, plumbing and other trades. “The world is changing very dramatically in post-secondary education, and we’ve got to be very vigilant,” Dryden says. And vigilant is exactly what young Andy Longhurst was when he cast around the country in search of a university with a curriculum and campus community that would suit his goals. Perhaps Longhurst is an exception to the rule, given that he says he started formulating university plans in Grade 9, at an age when most teenagers are preoccupied with other more primal pursuits. Still, there’s no doubt, B.C.’s post-secondary institutions will have to work extra hard to attract and retain the bright minds of the future. In the case of Longhurst, he is one of the ones that got away. After weighing his options, he decided to pack his laptop and bags for Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. With its solid academic reputation and dynamic student community that’s integrated with the surrounding city, Longhurst says Queen’s felt like the kind of place he could thrive in. To him, many of B.C.’s universities and colleges seem like commuter campuses: isolated islands of academia within larger communities. Ultimately, it was this difference that drew him eastward, that and admittedly a desire to leave the family nest and gain some independence. He’s not the first. “The last thing I want is a four-year degree that’s just another high-school diploma and I’ll end up being a barista,” Longhurst says with a chuckle. Laugh if you want – somewhere out there in the education industry there is probably a degree in the fine art of making the perfect espresso awaiting the right batch of students.