It’s application season, so I thought I would put some thought together on the factors that drive applications. I hope you enjoy it.
How and when do young people choose to go to post-secondary education? This is one of those questions that made sense thirty years ago, but now it’s just not all that interesting. Most students in high school know they are staying in school after grade 12. It’s not a decision, it’s just something they absorb from their environment – mostly, but not exclusively, their home environment. You might think that this fact would be a reason to expect provincial secondary and post-secondary systems to talk to one another in a collaborative fashion on the matter of the expected outcomes of secondary school curriculum, but you would be wrong because this is Canada, and nobody cares about outcomes. Students who are genuinely undecided about post-secondary by grade 12 are getting very rare and mostly consist of people who already have a foot in the labour market. Many of these people end up making a true go/no go decisions a couple of years later when/if they attend as mature students.
How do future students choose college versus university? This question is a little bit less understood, partly because the line between college and university has been gradually blurring in many provinces with the advent of degree-granting colleges/polytechnics over the last couple of decades. Such data as we have suggests that at the start of their high school years, very few students are aiming for college – the percentage saying they are interested in college spikes pretty heavily in the last year. Possibly this is a result of students re-calibrating expectations as they start to understand what kinds of grades they need to get into particular university programs (although with the expansion of universities, this is not as big a factor as it used to be). But it may also simply be the result of the discovery/guidance process: students start off more aware of universities than colleges but as the search process proceeds, they learn about and are attracted to colleges. That seems a slightly odd explanation to me in that more parents have college credentials than university ones and if students are getting their PSE expectations from home, you’d assume parental knowledge of colleges gets passed on to some degree. It’s a puzzle, worthy of more study for sure.
How do young people choose their area of study? This is a very understudied area – in Canada at least – but as you can imagine, there is a lot of family cultural capital involved. Doctors’ children want to be doctors (and get lots of encouragement in that direction), lawyers’ children want to be lawyers, etc. etc. That makes occupational (and thus class) stratification a multi-generational thing, which – not to put to fine a point on it – is bad for both equality and democracy. You’d think there would therefore be a bit more research on this topic, but there isn’t.
One factor at play here that is perhaps underrated here is how students understandwhat different fields of study are and how they lead to careers. This is particularly true in humanities and social sciences, where many disciplines go by names that are not well understood by 18-year-olds. “Linguistics” for instance, is something that no one takes in high school and so they don’t understand what it entails. Same with “Anthropology”, though in this case things are made worse by many departments’ insistence on describing themselves in terms that require a minimum of a bachelor’s degree to understand. (HESA once did a review of a new interdisciplinary program at a Canadian institution where the program managers had insisted on asking potential students “are you an X-shaped innovator?” in the first line of their web-page pitch, which didn’t strike us as the kind of thing that would convince a single being in the entire universe to explore this particular educational path). Note that this doesn’t happen for STEM: Math, Biology, Chemistry, and Physics are all well-understood by high school students and Engineering faculties spend boatloads of time in high schools doing information sessions and challenges and camps, which helps demystify and popularize that discipline. Humanities programs could do similar kinds of thing but mostly choose not to: this, to my mind, has a lot to do with the relative decline in interest in humanities enrolments.
How do students choose which college to go to? This is pretty simple: if the nearest college has the program they want, students go there. If it does not, students will go to the nearest one in commuting distance that does. There are exceptions, but this explains 90% + of domestic enrolment. It’s one of the reasons colleges in Toronto and Vancouver – which are really the only two competitive markets for college-level education – spend so much time trying to get ahead of the labour market and come up with new programs that other local colleges don’t.
How do students choose which university to go to? So, the answer to this one is a tiny bit more complicated and has changed a bit over time.
Canada differs from the US in the sense that students have to apply to a program rather than a university (which for the most part causes nothing but useless complication for admissions departments). And yet, until fairly recently, students did tend to choose institutions rather than programs. But over time, particularly as expensive STEM programming has become more attractive, students seem to care more about entering very specific programs. In that sense, the Canadian university market has become more like the college market in recent years.
But not identical. It’s a little bit different because university-bound students tend to come from more affluent backgrounds than college-bound ones, and so the geographic range in which they are looking for their program of choice is a little bit wider. We shouldn’t overstate this, though: fewer than 10% of undergraduates leave their province of origin (which in fact means about 25% in the Maritimes and 6-7% everywhere else). And in Ontario, where students often leave home to study, they often stay close enough to home that they can return at weekends to have someone do their laundry (this would be true for all those GTA students studying in Guelph, K-W, Hamilton and St. Catherines).
In the US, admissions research often talks about a decision “funnel”, the metaphor being that students start by being widely open to many institutions, which they gradually whittle down to a single choice. HESA’s research in this area tells a different story for Canada. Most students in grade 11 start with three or maybe four choices. That choice set expands in early grade 12 as they start actively looking at universities, but it collapses pretty quickly, and most students go back to their original 3-4 choices by Christmas before applications start. And most of those 3-4 choices are determined by geographic proximity to their him.
This, by the way, is why Maclean’s rankings have never actually been that important as a determinant of student destinations in Canada. Whether you agree with it or not, it provides a pan-Canadian view on relative institutional quality, but most students have no interest in most of the universities portrayed because they have already been eliminated as a choice. Add to that the fact that students are increasingly likely to focus on program rather than institution, and you can see that Maclean’s is probably of declining relevance to students (though it remains of enormous value to universities who would be lost without the advertising opportunities it provides if it did not exist).
A final note: if you ask students how they would like to make decisions about where to study, they will nearly all tell you that it’s about aspects of institutional culture that you can only discover by word of mouth. “What’s the music scene like? Are there lots of Swifties?”, “How seriously is fashion taken? Will I be an outcast if I go to class in pajamas?”. It would be possible using survey methods to provide students with information like this. but universities simply hate the idea because i) such preferences aren’t rational ii) announcing such preferences to the world may repel students as well as attract them (what if you aren’t a Swiftie, or think pajamas in class are a kind of atrocity?) and iii) some things that attract students are simply infra dig, like being known as a “party school”, a title no school wants, even though according to some readings of the data, party schools actually have high levels of social cohesion and engagement, leading to lower dropout rates – all things every school should want.
Anyways, enough for now. May everyone’s applications numbers stay strong this year.
