If there’s one type of Canadian educational survey where complete and utter stasis has set in, it’s graduate surveys. Questions like “are you employed,” “what are your earnings,” and “were you satisfied with your education” aren’t just boring, I think they’re actively making us stupider. There seems to be a general view that because the answers to these questions don’t change very much from year to year, that we’re doing as good a job as we ever have.
But labour market results aren’t achieved in a vacuum. Economic conditions (both global and local) play a role, as do demographics. Canada’s labour force, which has been increasing in size since WWII, is predicted to plateau in the next couple of years and then decline slightly thereafter. As employers get desperate for workers, they’ll take anyone (think about Alberta fast-food workers making $17/hour in the boom years); in those conditions, low levels of graduate unemployment can’t be taken as evidence of educational excellence.
In future, universities and colleges are going to be judged on how they make students more productive, not on whether they’re employed. That means institutions will need to dig a lot deeper in terms of figuring out how students acquire competencies and then put them into use. Surveys can be helpful in working out which elements of a student’s education proved to be useful and which didn’t. Graduates – even those from disciplines which aren’t vocationally-oriented (i.e., the humanities) – have a pretty good sense of which of their courses were useful and which were decorative. Identifying the courses (and professors!) that graduates in the labour force rate highly can be an enormously powerful tool in curriculum revision.
So, here’s a suggestion for graduate surveys: let’s ease up on the strictly quantitative stuff. The next time you do a survey of graduates, don’t ask them if they were satisfied with their education – ask them which class contributed most to their success in the job market. Don’t ask whether they’d recommend a university to a friend – ask them what missing skills they most wished they’d got before leaving school. Trust me, the answers will be revealing.
Finally: stop wasting information, and link individual graduates’ surveys to their student records. It’s not as time-consuming and expensive as you think, and it vastly increases the explanatory power of the available data.
As I mentioned Monday, Canadian institutions underwent a data revolution in the late 90’s and early 00’s, but unfortunately a benchmarking agenda took over and the discovery agenda was put to the side. But as we’ve shown over the past three days, it doesn’t have to be that way. Better surveys are possible; we just need to design and execute them.
Let’s do it!
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I have to comment on the line: “In future, universities and colleges are going to be judged on how they make students more productive, not on whether they’re employed.” It did not escape notice that this line implies a shitf in the focus of benefit. Where “whether they are employed” reflects a benefit to the worker/learner, “make students more productive” suggests a benefit to the employer. This demand-sided thinking has colonized education policy discourse and it is worrisome. The rest of the posting does include language suggestive of benefit to the individual, but I want to caution and warn against increasing focus on post-secondary meeting the needs of business/industry first and foremost over it meeting the needs of individuals. Indeed, these are not mutually exclusive and sometimes the difference is subtle. But I would like to see the needs of the individual kept more central in our conceptualization of higher education.
Hi Carrie. Thanks for your comment.
Productivity is a measure of output over a given period of time (per hour, per day, etc.). How the extra output generated by productivity gets split between worker and employer is a matter that gets decided through various types of bargaining, including collective bargaining.
A country with more productive citizens can consume more goods of both a public and private nature and standards of living will rise. If they are less productive, there will be fewer goods to be purchased (public or private) and standards of living will stagnate or fall (the Italian experience over the last ten years is quite instructive). A productivity agenda is a standard-of-living agenda which matters to individuals and society as well as employers.