One of my favourite reports released last winter was a little gem, written by a team of Ontario researchers and published by the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO), entitled High School Success and Access to Postsecondary Education. It tells the very good news story that access to post-secondary education is rising quite rapidly in the city of Toronto across all income groups. 

The study is interesting because it makes use of the Ontario Education Number to link individual record data on Toronto District School Board (TDSB) students (including not just course choice, grades, discipline, attendance, but also information from the Ontario Student Census such as self-reported race, immigrant status and family structure) to data on applications and acceptances from the Ontario University Application Centre (OUAC) and the Ontario College Service (OCAS).  I don’t think I am exaggerating to say that this is probably the highest-quality database ever used to examine access in Canada.  For data nerds, this paper would have been a big deal regardless of what it actually said.

So, what did it say?

The data strategy used was to follow two TDSB cohorts, one from 2006 and the other from 2011, from grade 9 onwards for a period of five years, thus allowing for the so-called “victory-lap” (a fifth year of high school).  Transitions to post-secondary education are monitored through the OUAC/OCAS application process over two years (Start year +4 and start year +5).  One limitation here is that students who apply to an Ontario school but choose to go somewhere outside the province can’t be tracked, but that’s probably a relatively small number.

Among the findings that largely confirm things seen in previous studies:

• Neighbourhood income and parental educational attainment and having special educational needs were not statistically significant predictors of high school completion or college attendance, but were predictors of university attendance (although the effect is really not that strong – the influence between the top and bottom 10% in neighbourhood income is about as big as the influence of gender)
• East Asian students were more likely to graduate high school than whites.
• All ethnicities except Latin American and mixed race were more likely to attend both university and college than whites.
•  Females are much more likely to attend university than males.

 Among the findings that should cause some surprise are:

• High school completion rates rose 6.5 percentage points to 84.4% from 2006 to 2011, which is a heck of a lot in a small space of time.
• In 2006, higher neighbourhood income slightly increased the probability of finishing high school.  By 2011, this was no longer the case, and I cannot think of a jurisdiction anywhere else in the world where this is true, so this is a pretty amazing result.
•  The proportion of high school students from each cohort who enrolled in post-secondary rose from 62 to 70%, with college enrolments rising proportionately somewhat faster than university ones.  Again, this is among the highest in the world, so let’s take a bow.
• The likelihood of special needs students finishing secondary school or attending any kind of PSE fell dramatically across these five years, which is concerning and should be followed up and examined a lot more closely.

A fair question here is: ok, what exactly changed between the 2006 cohort and the 2011 cohort that might have cause these changes?  Well, one obvious possibility is that student aid got a lot better: grants via OSAP were more than twice as plentiful in 2015-16 when the second cohort hit PSE as it was when the first cohort did so.  The problem with that explanation is that it’s hard to see how that explains the increasing secondary school completion rate which, fairly clearly, is one of the main drivers of the increase in post-secondary participation.  A simpler explanation is simply that students and parents understand that education opens doors and that some post-secondary education is a must.  The better financial aid doesn’t hurt, but it’s probably not the decisive factor.

Granted, this study only covers the Toronto Public School Board, and is not fully representative of the city (which has four school boards – English Public and Catholic, French Public and Catholic), let alone Ontario or the rest of Canada.  But it’s always good to see evidence that barriers to access are getting lower.  It’s a rare but very necessary corrective to the usual doom-and-gloom talk.