When starting out in international comparative higher education, one of the hardest things to do is to keep an open mind.  Universities are universities, you think.  They may vary in the way they are managed and funded, but what they are for, what they do and who they serve is the same everywhere, isn’t it?  But this is not, in fact, true.  And one of the most basic ways that universities around the world differ is the ages of the students they serve. 

The transition to university, first of all, has changed a lot over time.  In the antebellum US, it was not uncommon for young teenagers to gain admission to colleges (if I recall correctly, Columbia’s average age of admission was 12 or 13 well into the 19^th Century.  Even in the 20^th century, high school completion was not necessarily seen as a prerequisite to college admission: Martin Luther King, for instance, entered Morehouse College at age 15 (it was 1944, and many colleges who had lost students to the Armed Forces were relaxing their admissions criteria).  The idea that there is a “natural” progression at age 17 or 18 is a product of the post-war age.

But even in the post-war period, the progression towards university varied between countries, mainly due to the existence of national military service.  In countries where this existed, it was usually the case that many young people did their service before going to school, meaning that those who entered university were perhaps 19, 20 or even 21.  In Israel, which still has a lengthy mandatory military service, this is still the case and students tend not to enter university until they are 21 or so.

(South Korea, which has similar conscription rules, is slightly different: there, the tradition is that 18-year-olds tend to go to university for a year or two, then do their military service, and then return to their universities to get their degrees.  This has had two significant consequences in South Korean society.  The first is that when South Korean students protest, they are led by people who have had several years of military training, which makes them quite a formidable force if things get violent, as they did in the 1987 democracy protests.  The second is that because students keep taking credits while on deployment in the military, there is a huge policy challenge in making sure that credits are portable across multiple institutions, which is a major reason why Korea has developed things like degrees based on self-study and the National Credit Bank.  But I digress).

Even in countries which no longer have universal military service (and most countries got rid of it at the end of the Cold War if not before), the tradition of not progressing straight from secondary school to university has continued.  Thus, in Nordic countries, the typical age of entry to university is 20 or 21 rather than 17 or 18 as it is here.  What do young people do in those years?  They work.  They travel.  They grow up a bit.  Simply put, the idea that growing up must happen in an institutional setting is not universally accepted the way it is in North America.

There are consequences to this, of course.  The main one being that European universities on the whole have better students than North American ones.  They are not more naturally intelligent.  And judging from PISA data they aren’t really better taught in high school either.  What they have instead is greater maturity.  They have more self-knowledge and a better sense of what they want to do with their lives, which leads them to do a lot less mid-stream program-switching (the more structured system of university programs, less reliant than ours on having students navigating a smorgasboard system of course options, probably helps too).  With a couple of years of work on their belts, they are also more likely to have a sense of time regulation, to know how to self-motivate to get tasks done, and to know how to ask questions about how to complete tasks.  They are just more complete human beings. 

Nothing our students couldn’t do, too…if we asked them to.  So why don’t we?

Here’s a thought experiment.  What if we actually refused to take students into universities without a minimum 12-month period after the end of secondary school?  Or at least, we gave students with a year or two’s work experience preference in admissions?  Say, by tacking on an extra five percentage points to their high school average when considering them for admission, in recognition for their greater maturity?

I get it, people would freak out.  North Americans have a pretty rigid notion of what success paths look like and “time out of school” generally gets coded negatively.  It is seen as “wasted” time, again because “growing up” is something you do in institutions.  But I think we should think of the benefits instead.  My guess is that students’ greater self-awareness would lead to better program choices and thus lower dropouts/stopouts.  It would also probably lead to better quality work in class – something which would probably improve morale among staff – and a greater sense of satisfaction among students themselves.  And, I would imagine, a whole lot less helicopter parenting.

And as for the negatives, I can’t think of many, can you? 

It would be a hard cultural shift to engineer, but I think there are sufficient benefits that it’s worth it for Canadian institutions and governments to consider how to do it.  We know it’s possible, because so many countries do it already, with no obvious drawbacks.  It’s just a question of will.

Nota bene: Normally this blog publishes for seven consecutive weeks before breaking for a week or longer (in the case of Christmas and summer). This year, a normal publication schedule would have seen the break take place in the third week of April, i.e. just before the federal vote, which would have made it difficult to cover party platforms, which are likely to come out quite late this year because of the snap nature of the election.  Because of this, we decided to move up the break week to next week.  There will therefore be no blog or podcast next week, with regular service resuming on Monday April 14 and continuing through to the second week of June.  See you then!