Today I want to talk a little bit about what’s going to happen to university admissions worldwide over the next couple of months, and why the chaos looks set to last well into the fall, even if everyone re-opens in the late summer.  I will group the “chaos causers” into three and talk about them in ascending order of chaos.

The domestic undergraduate recruitment cycle ended early.  Domestic students often take the spring to figure out where they are going, and campus visits usually play an important role in helping them narrow their options to a final choice.  Smaller schools outside the major urban areas – say Trent or Laurentian in Ontario – very often say that the campus visit is the most important tool they have to pull students in from the larger urban centres like Ottawa and Toronto. 

This is a big deal in southern Ontario and the Maritimes, where you have a lot of institutions with overlapping niches and similar levels of prestige in a spread-out area competing for students.  It is probably not a big deal in say, Winnipeg, where you have two universities and almost everyone has been to both campuses and knows what they are about instinctively.  Indeed, it’s probably not a major issue between Vancouver and Thunder Bay. 

Campus visits are done for a couple of months at least.  So how do students make decisions?  That’s anyone’s guess, but my suspicion is that we will see some different patterns this fall in terms of how students will make decisions in the absence of these visits.  Institutions in large cities will probably see higher yields this year (that is, a greater fraction of the students they admit will show up) and those in smaller cities will see lower ones (Queen’s excepted, probably).  Financial consequences will flow from this.

The International Dimension.  This piece is so up in the air I am not sure I can write sensibly about it.  Direct recruitment is at a standstill because of travel restrictions.  Agents are, I assume, still active in India (for another week or two, anyway) but not in China.  But at this point in the cycle it’s not clear institutions are going to open in September.  Will international students still want to come if the health situation here is seen as more dangerous than at home?  Will they have been able to take the necessary TOEFL/SAT/whatever examinations to put them in contention for studying abroad?  Even if they do, how can anyone enroll students if they don’t know for sure whether they will be open?  Given that nearly all our institutions have become sustained by international student revenue, you have to assume that we’ll keep enrolling them until the very last possible minute when a decision has to be made about resumption of classes. 

But when is that date, exactly?  We just don’t know.  On the one hand, you want it to be late to ensure the maximum chance to bring the students over and keep that cash flow going.  On the other hand, the longer you wait, the less time there is to deal with the financial chaos that will ensue if they don’t come back.  This is a heck of a dilemma.

(And that assumes that just because universities and colleges are open, mobility restrictions will also be back to where they were last week.  On Friday, the Legault government specifically banned universities from enrolling any new international students, and given the ruling Coalition Avenir Québec’s xenophobic tendencies, it’s not entirely clear how quickly they will back off this decision). 

Admissions criteria.  This isn’t a huge deal in Canada, per se.  There are a few provinces which have provincial exams that are almost certainly going to be disrupted (Alberta, BC, Manitoba and – I think – Newfoundland), but universities in these places are used to offering places based on school grades only, so I don’t think this will be particularly disruptive (though some students who had counted on pulling up their grades with a late surge might be out of luck).  But pretty much everywhere else in the world outside North America, this is a mindbogglingly enormous problem. 

In Canada, students are mostly admitted to institutions based on continuous assessment of performance over a number of years.  We think of this as normal.  In fact, it is precisely because of this approach that we feel reasonably comfortable offering university places long before students finish school.  But in most of the rest of the world, this approach is totally anathema.  To most of the world, the only way to measure academic aptitude is to test the living daylights out of students on the entire curriculum in one big shot in either May or June.  Hence UK A-levels, the French baccalauréat, the Italian maturità, the Chinese gaokao etc.  Pretty much every country in Europe bar Norway (which has something close to our system) has a form of high-stakes testing taken at the vey end of studies; and while I can’t say I know all of Asia very well, certainly the big three northern countries (China, Korea, Japan) all have something similar. 

Now imagine you run a university system in any of these countries, and someone tells you those exams might not happen this year.  What do you do?

Whatever problems admissions directors are going to have in Canada (where the issues are mostly going to be about getting bums in seats to pay the bills), they are nothing compared to the chaos these countries are going see in a few months.  The equivalent here would be: “imagine an admission season where you were not allowed to look at applicants’ grades”. 

Nobody is substantially grappling with this problem in Europe yet because they’re still figuring out how to save the semester and in many countries they haven’t yet accepted that mass gatherings for testing aren’t going to be possible even by June.  But in a couple of weeks, this problem is going to hit people very, very hard.  Do they move to some kind of unprecedented online testing (really doubtful, for obvious proctoring reasons)?  Do they delay the tests and thereby delay the start of the next school year (likeliest scenario, IMHO)?  Or do they – whisper it softly – kill the tests and move to some form of assessment based on school performance?

I think it would be excellent if many of these countries were to take the opportunity this crisis affords to re-think their addiction to high-stakes testing.  Combined with the early academic streaming of students in many countries, it privileges the privileged – particularly those who can afford private tutoring to improve their proficiency in taking examinations – in multiple ways (which is among the many reasons why “free tuition” European countries have levels of social stratification in academia which are at least as high as in the United States).  Ending it would be a boon to equality in educational outcomes.           

Now, I really doubt this will happen, because those societies are deeply wedded to the notion of “merit” or “ability” being measurable only through high-stakes exam results, so much so that when I was working on a project in this area a few years ago, some interviewees seemed to literally have difficulty conceiving of merit being measured any other way.   Certainly, it is not going to happen in China, where the concept of merit and examinations have been tied together for a couple of millennia.  But elsewhere, it is at least conceivable that one or two countries might change things up and on the whole that would be a very good thing.

Stay safe, everyone.