In our annual Globe Survey, we ask students to describe, using an 11-point scale, the extent to which their school is geared towards serving graduate students or undergraduates. As you’d expect, undergraduates tend to be slightly more satisfied (y-axis) with their schools the more undergraduate they perceive it to be. It’s not a huge effect, and it’s presumably correlated to some degree with size, but it’s there.

Figure 1: Satisfaction as a Function of Perceived Grad-centricness

What’s really interesting, though, is that the degree to which students believe their institution to be “graduate centric” and the degree to which it actually is graduate-centric (as measured by the percentage of the student body that is enrolled in graduate studies) can differ substantially, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Perceptions of Grad-centricness vs. Proportion of Students Enrolled in Graduate Programs

The y-axis in Figure 2 is students’ perceptions of grad-centredness, the x-axis is the percentage of the student body enrolled in graduate programs, and the upward-sloping trend line indicates a general positive correlation of the two. Institutions below the line are institutions that are perceived as being less graduate-centric than they actually are; those above the line are perceived as being more graduate-centric than they actually are.

A few intriguing points here:

1) Students correlate size with not being concerned with undergraduates, regardless of the actual presence of graduate students. Small schools almost without exception score below the line regardless of their graduate populations. This is spectacularly so in the case of Mount St. Vincent, which does an astonishing job of disguising the fact that it is the third most graduate-intensive school in the country (I know it’s mostly M.Ed. students, but they still count).

2) Concordia is the only really large school which lands well below the line (kudos to David Graham and his team!); Laurier and Sherbrooke, though somewhat smaller, also deserve mention for being considered a long way below the line. Queen’s is the only U-15 school which makes it below the line.

3) Queen’s and Laurier apart, nearly all Ontario schools are above the line – even places like Brescia and OCAD. One wonders whether Ontario schools’ constant chasing of prestige via research isn’t actually hurting some school brands which could be better served by a more undergraduate focus.

4) The U of T suburban campuses are suffering from a serious disconnect. There’s very little graduate work being done on these campuses, yet students there are convinced that their institutions are focused on graduate students.

It is clearly possible to have lots of graduate students without alienating one’s undergraduate students. Excellence in both areas is clearly a sweet spot more institutions should try to emulate.