Canada has never really had much of an explicit debate about what constitutes academic merit. But we’re about to, thanks to the Ford Government in Ontario. And some of the battle lines will look very close to the ones we have been seeing in the United States since the Supreme Court’s decision on Student for Fair Admissions v. Harvard three years ago.
This fall, the Ontario legislature passed Bill 33. I examined this piece of legislation when it was introduced back in June. What the law says is:
Every college or university…shall
(a) ensure that when assessing applicants for the purposes of admission into a program of study, assessment is based on the merit of the individual applicant; and
(b) publish, in a manner accessible to the public, the criteria and process to be used by the college or university in assessing applicants for admission into each program of study.
And then states:
“The Lieutenant Governor in Council [i.e. cabinet] may make regulations governing the criteria and process to be used by every college or university…in assessing applicants for the purposes of admission into a program of study, and without limiting the generality of this power, may make regulations specifying criteria that must be or that may not be considered in assessing the merit of an applicant…” (emphasis mine)
In other words: the government is preparing to smack institutions whose definitions of “merit” do not match those of the Premier’s Office. I think it is widely understood that the origin of this measure came from Ford’s fury at the announcement by Toronto Metropolitan University’s new Faculty of Medicine that it was going to reserve 75% of its seats for students coming through its Indigenous, Black, and Equity-Deserving admissions pathways. And though the percentage set-aside is high (justified by the institution on grounds that the new school’s mission is precisely to serve those communities), TMU is hardly the only institution with dedicated pathways for underserved students.
Medical school is a big flashpoint for the general public because it is an obvious area of scarcity; that is, demand so far exceeds supply that the conditions used to ration spots really matters. But it’s not the only area: many STEM and health subjects have a similar dynamic. Partly because of increased demand, and partly because of widespread grade inflation, institutions can’t just use grades to ration spots. Increasingly, they are turning to other types of information in order to ration spaces among those with very high grades, including various forms of “personal statement” which allows programs to discriminate between students based on things like family background, extra-curricular involvement, etc. Generally speaking, these processes are trying to tilt admissions a bit to students with less privileged backgrounds on the grounds that for them to have got equal marks to more affluent kids, they must have “travelled further”, which is itself a kind of merit. This is not quite what the Americans call “holistic admissions”; it’s closer to the British practice of “contextualized admissions”. And it’s becoming increasingly common.
The question is: how is the Ford Government going to approach all of this?
As near as I can tell, it has four options.
- It can take stock of the full variety of pathways and adjudication of merit and say “eh, this is all too complicated/post-secondary institutes are doing a decent job”. It should go without saying that this is almost certainly the least likely outcome.
- It can leave contextualized admissions alone but try to limit the practice of special pathways for Indigenous, racialized or otherwise underserved students. That is, it might give a pass to programs where 10-20% of places are reserved for certain underserved groups, but at the same time say “75% in reserved pathways (as TMU proposes) is too much”. I suspect this is the likeliest option.
- It can leave contextualized admissions alone but eliminate pathways entirely. This would mean eliminating things like the U of T’s Indigenous Student Application Program and many other programs like it. My read of Conservatives’ views on this is that they tend to be warier of Indigeneity initiatives than they are of critiquing EDI as a whole, seeing more justice in the claims advanced by Indigenous communities than they do for Black ones (for instance). I think this is less likely than option 2 but would not rule it out.
- It could seek to eliminate both pathways and contextualized admissions and tell institutions that the only thing they should use is high school grades.
That last one might sound radical, but pay attention to what the Ford government has been doing in secondary schools, and in particular the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), which runs a large number of schools which were formerly selective (e.g. Schools of the Arts, Special STEM focus schools, International Baccalaureates, etc.). The selectivity process, naturally, was criticized because marks are often correlated with family income, and so 3 years ago, at the peak of the EDI wave, the TDSB decided to abandon selections and make all these schools lottery-based, which in theory at least would make access to these programs more equitable.
I have no idea whether this policy met its goal or not; to my knowledge there has not been a publicly released study on this. But it caused a number of people to freak out. Accusations of penalizing students who worked hard, of “devaluing merit” began to circulate. And there was some force to those arguments, particularly (IMHO) for elite Fine Arts programs where students no longer had to submit portfolios as evidence of talent/interest, which I think is a bit odd.
I have never seen any surveys about this issue, but my guess is that it rankled particularly hard among parents in the entitled upper-middle class and aspirational Chinese families, since these are the groups that tend to do best in a “marks-only” system (for more on how Chinese parents view contextual ideas of merit, do listen to my podcast interview with Ruixue Jia, co-author of The Highest Exam from lastfall). And so, Ford government to the rescue! The government instructed the TDSB to ditch the policy, to loud applause from Trustee Weidong Pei, who gained office campaigning against lotteries. Replacing the lottery system? Well, according to the TDSB “Applicants will be seated based on their overall applicant score; a combination of select report card marks connected to their program of choice and an evaluated demonstration of knowledge and skills”, which sounds a lot like the previous marks-only based system, with all the class-and culture-based biases that brings.
In other words, if the TDSB’s experience is anything to go by, the Ford government will go straight to option 4. And if that happens, it will be a seriously contentious affair since almost certainly it will mean a big reduction in students from underserved groups getting into high-demand programs.
Now, none of this is going to happen in this admissions cycle (at least I bloody hope not). The likeliest scenario is that the government makes a move in the spring or summer, in order to put new rules in place – whatever those rules end up being – in place for the fall 2027 admissions cycle. So, we have a few months left before the wars start. But when they start, it won’t be pretty.
