Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Social Affairs, Science and Technology
Issue 9 - Evidence - November 5, 2009
OTTAWA, Thursday, November 5, 2009
The Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology met this day at 10:43 a.m. to consider the accessibility of post-secondary education in Canada.
Senator Art Eggleton (Chair) in the chair.
[Translation]
The Chair: Welcome to the Standing Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology.
[English]
Today, we are having our second meeting on post-secondary education. The financial barriers to post-secondary education is the particular theme of today.
I am very pleased to welcome Professor Ben Levin from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, associated with the University of Toronto. In addition to teaching, Professor Levin holds the Canadian Research Chair in Education Leadership and Policy. He just completed two and a half years as Deputy Minister of Education for the Province of Ontario. In March 2009, he produced the final report on the commission on tuition fees and accessibility for post-secondary education in Manitoba.
I think we have a copy of that here.
Before I ask the witness to say a few words, welcome to Senator Stewart Olsen from New Brunswick who is here today, filling in for Senator Hugh Segal.
Welcome, Mr. Levin. The floor is yours. Take your time in presenting, and we will enter into a dialogue.
Ben Levin, Professor, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto: Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It is a great pleasure for me to be here to have the opportunity to talk with you about this important issue.
I will make some very brief opening comments. I am currently a Professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. My career is half academic and half civil servant. I was the Deputy Minister of Education in Ontario. Earlier, I was Deputy Minister of Education and Deputy Minister of Advanced Education in Manitoba. I have worked in government in Manitoba and Ontario, and then I have alternated that with periods in the university. Therefore, I go back to study what works in practice to see if it can work in theory, as we say in the university.
In the summer of 2008, I was asked by Manitoba's Minister of Advanced Education and Training, the Honourable Diane McGifford, to be a one-person commission on tuition fees and accessibility to post-secondary education. The Manitoba government had a tuition freeze for 10 years. When the NDP was elected in 1999, which is when I became Deputy Minister in Manitoba, they actually reduced tuition fees and froze them for 10 years. They wanted to look at the impact of that policy. I believe you have the summary of my report, and it was issued last spring.
Today, I will try to very quickly make some overview points about accessibility to post-secondary education and then I would be happy to respond to any questions and comments and enter into discussion.
First, we know that participation in post-secondary education in Canada, especially in universities, continues to be skewed on the basis of social class and other factors, such as geography and social factors. It is inequitable in Canada. It became more so in 1990s. It is inequitable in every other country in the world, as well.
Second, we know a lot about how to increase participation and how to reduce the inequities in post-secondary education. There is a large body of evidence and experience on how to do that. Finances are a part of the picture but they are only a part. While most of the attention suggests that finances are the decisive aspect around participation and equity of participation, the evidence does not actually support that view. The evidence suggests that non-financial barriers are at least as important, and probably more important, than financial barriers.
I will say a bit about the nonfinancial barriers. The most obvious of these is completion of secondary school, which remains a prerequisite for most students for tertiary participation. Secondary school completion rates in Canada are 75 to 80 per cent. They are significantly lower in Quebec and Alberta. However, we know something about how to increase high school graduation rates which, in turn, would support increased tertiary participation.
That is one of the things. If we want more participation, and more equitable participation, we need to improve high school graduation rates, because the students who do not graduate are also the students who are least likely to be enter tertiary education. They are more likely to be poor, Aboriginal, rural and so on.
The second point related to this, as Senator Fairbairn mentioned, has to do with adult learning. We have a significant number of adults in Canada who have aspirations for more education. They do not necessarily have opportunities to qualify for it or to participate in it. That is a second key area under the non-financial barriers.
There is clear evidence that aspirations have an effect on participation, independent of ability and achievement. Whether people see themselves participating in post-secondary education is important. Whether others encourage them to see themselves as participating is important. Aspiration is an area that needs attention.
My next point touches on outreach to particular communities. For some groups of students, for example some recent immigrant groups, Aboriginal students, and others whose participation is at relatively low levels, we know that targeted programs of outreach and support can encourage participation.
Manitoba has had 40 years of experience with the set of programs that have brought students into post-secondary education who would have been considered unqualified and allowed them to be successful in quite demanding programs. These are largely Aboriginal students. For example, the University of Manitoba has trained a very large proportion of the Aboriginal doctors and engineers in Canada.
It has done that through a very deliberate program, which was funded by the Province of Manitoba — originally by the province and the federal government, but for the last several years only by the province. It has set out to recruit people and to support them in being successful.
We have evidence that if you have targeted outreach and support, you can get large numbers of people who would not have even met the entrance qualifications to be successful in quite demanding programs in colleges and universities.
Information is critical. There is evidence to show that the people least likely to participate are people who overestimate the costs and underestimate the benefits of participation in post-secondary education. People are making rational decisions, but they are based on the wrong information. They think it costs more and they do not understand the benefits economically and otherwise. Providing better information to people about what it actually costs and what the benefits are is critical. We do not do it well currently.
Finally, under the non-financial issues, I would mention incentives to institutions to look at outreach to different target populations and to change the equity picture in among those they recruit. Currently, most universities are trying to recruit the top 10 per cent of students. There is very little effort — some, but not enough — to recruit people who are currently under-represented but could benefit and be successful with the right supports.
I will speak a bit about the financial side. The first thing to say about financing post-secondary education is that although all the attention tends to go to tuition fees, tuition fees, within reasonable ranges, appear to have little or no impact on participation rates.
My view on tuition, and the view I recommended to the Manitoba government, is that we should not be trying to reduce tuition fees. We should be trying to keep them modest and moderate, and we should be trying to prevent sudden or rapid rises. Reducing tuition fees, however, would be a counter-productive policy because it would be quite expensive and have very little impact on participation or equity of participation. We can talk about that more later on.
I would say, however, that we do not want unregulated tuition fees because we would then get rapid rises in tuition. We have some evidence that rapid rises in tuition have a negative impact on participation and equity of participation.
One area that is almost never talked about in this discussion is students' ability to earn. The more they can earn, the less they need to borrow. While we talk a lot about borrowing and loans, we hardly ever talk about earnings.
If you start thinking about student earnings, there are two things I talked about in the report. One is minimum wage. Students are a huge proportion of minimum wage earners in this country; so if minimum wages rise, students are more able to finance their education and have less need to borrow.
The second is opportunities for students to earn in ways that are related to their program of studies. Where students can undertake work — whether it is in their community or in their institution — that connects to their studies, they get a double benefit. They get a benefit from the education point of view. As well, they are more able to earn income and, therefore, have less need for subsidies and borrowing. The whole area of helping students earn more has been neglected.
I will say a little bit about student aid. My own view is that students should continue to pay part of the costs of their post-secondary education. There are a lot reasons for that, which I lay out in the report. However, I believe we should limit the maximum debt students could incur.
It is not a matter of eliminating debt. Post-secondary education continues to be a very good investment for the majority of students. It is a matter of limiting the maximum debt. For example, if we were to undertake to limit debt to $5,000 per student per year for full-time study, students would end up with a maximum debt after a four-year program of $20,000. This is quite financeable based on the improved earnings students typically get.
There would be a maximum that students would know would protect them. Then all their other recognized needs past that would be met through various forms of loan rebates, bursaries and other kinds of support.
I think that is doable. We got close to that in Manitoba. We were able to limit debt to $6,000 a year, which is not too far off that.
The second part of that is protection from catastrophe. We hear a lot about students who end up with huge debt loads. In fact, a very small number of students end up with huge debt loads. Half the students in Canada do not borrow at all to finance their post-secondary education. For the small number who do, it has a negative impact. Their stories have a high deterrent impact on other students, particularly those students who are least financially secure, and these are the ones most likely to say "I cannot end up with $30,000 in debt."
If we had a process through which we could protect students and say, first, we will limit your maximum debt; but second, if you end up in a situation through no fault of your own where you cannot pay that debt, it will be covered for you. We will not put you in a position where your future is in permanent jeopardy at the age of 21 because you had a catastrophic illness or something equivalent happened.
That kind of program would cost very little because it would affect very few students, but it would have a positive effect. It would be a kind of insurance for students, who would say, "I am willing to borrow because I know there is downside protection to this. It cannot end up as a catastrophe for me."
I will not talk a lot about the Canadian Student Loan Program; I am not an expert on it. However, the current interest rate we charge on student loans is way too high. It is way above prime, especially in the current interest rate environment. This is why we have increasing private borrowing by students. They can go to the bank and get a loan for half the price that CSL will charge them; and of course, you cannot default or declare bankruptcy on a Canada student loan either.
We are taking people who are very young, allowing some of them to borrow large amounts of money with almost no credit counselling — which is another thing we need to do better — and then putting it as a permanent inhibitor of their economic futures. This is the case for a small number of students, but it has a high deterrent effect on others.
We could finance almost all the changes I have discussed, which is what I recommended in Manitoba. There is a ready source of finance in the money now used for tax credits. The tax credit programs now for students in post- secondary education cost nearly $2 billion a year in Canada — twice the value of the Canada Student Loan Program. There is clear evidence that the tax credits do not have positive effects either on participation or on equity of participation. We could redirect money from tax credits and finance all the changes I have proposed in student aid and all the non-financial recommendations, and still leave a generous tax credit program in place. There is a way to finance all this, in my view.
Finally, I want to say a bit about targets, monitoring and research. It would be very helpful to have some targets for post-secondary participation in the country or in the provinces and territories, and have targets around greater equity in participation. Targets tend to focus peoples' attention, just as incentives would for institutions. Then we need a process to monitor how we are doing.
For the last eight or nine years, the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation has funded a program of research that has been instrumental in allowing me to do this work. Most of the research I used was financed by the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation. With the windup of the foundation, it is not clear whether that program of research will continue. There is a danger that we will lose most of the information we currently have around participation and accessibility, which would be very unfortunate.
I will stop there. That is a very quick tour of a large number of topics. I think it is better to have some discussion, as senators have questions or comments.
The Chair: That is a lot of information, a lot of good ideas. You are obviously drawing all this from a very extensive background.
In the last meeting, we had Marc Frenette from Statistics Canada tell us that in terms of financial concern, there is only a 12 per cent gap between low income and the higher income — the lower and higher quartiles. He came to the same conclusion that you did, that it is mainly not a financial barrier. I want to dissect that for a minute.
Is there a greater financial barrier to staying in the system, as opposed to getting into the system in the first place?
For many people with lower incomes, staying in the system means they have to earn the money themselves. When a recession hits and student unemployment is high, you would think that the financial barrier would become more of a distinct problem. Is that right?
Mr. Levin: There is certainly a greater barrier when students have more difficulty earning. As I mentioned, we have neglected earnings as one of the important issues around finance. The evidence is that commitment increases as students enter and succeed. The big decision is to go in the first place, and then it is the success at the outset. Once students have one year of success, they are likely to continue and complete.
There can be financial issues, but we know that one half of students do not borrow. It is a relatively small number of students who are affected. If we were able to cap debt at a point, it would provide a strong incentive for students to continue.
The Chair: One of the recommendations you made in the Manitoba case was the minimum wage. A higher minimum wage would help students to earn more so they could stay in the system. Every time we talk about increasing the minimum wage, we hear from the business community that it will put a damper on jobs. Usually, the students are the ones who suffer in that situation because they do not have as much experience as some other potential employees. Is it a two-edged sword? Does it pay to increase the minimum wage?
Mr. Levin: One of the nice things about being an academic is that I can make recommendations without having to care about those things. Contrast that with my civil service experience where I could not do that.
Economists would know more about this but my reading of the economics literature leads me to say there is mixed opinion on the impact of minimum wage increases on jobs. Some economists conclude that increases in the minimum wage will reduce employment significantly while other economists say that the effect would be very modest. There is debate among economists and the experts on what the impacts would be, but I understand the political challenges associated with it for any government.
The Chair: You cited a number of things that are non-financial barriers and talked about some of the things that needed to be done, such as provide better information, and said that too many people thought the costs outweighed the benefits, et cetera. However, you did not touch on something that we heard about last time. I would like your comment on the culture within the home. If the parents did not have a post-secondary education, perhaps they are not urging their children to complete a post-secondary education. How big is that factor and what could be done about it?
Mr. Levin: It is a very big factor. Aspirations are critically important and are usually set in the home. Some evidence suggests that students do not make use of school guidance counsellors and that their decisions are mainly made between themselves and their parents and friends. If your friends and parents do not know anything about university, you are unlikely to consider it as an option. That is why you need targeted programs of outreach. You need to go into communities where people do not have that connection build that connection. You have to start with students that are fairly young. There are many ways to do that. Many interesting things are done by universities and colleges across the country already, but much more could be done to increase people's aspirations.
One of the most interesting initiatives is the idea of dual credit courses, which we did in Manitoba when I was a deputy minister and have now done in Ontario. This is the idea that students while in secondary school, could start doing post-secondary courses and count them both as high school credits and as college or university credits. Outreach into an Aboriginal community could have high school students doing a first-year native studies course as part of their high school program, which would also give them knowledge of whether they can do the university level. They will have the credit for high school as well as banking the credit for post-secondary education. It is tangible and cost effective. There are many other things to do in that area.
Information is important because, as I said, one of the reasons aspirations are low is that people do not understand the costs and benefits. A focus on bringing people into the system is required.
The Chair: When you talk about colleges, are you referring to community college programs?
Mr. Levin: Yes.
Senator Keon: Mr. Levin, that was an extremely interesting presentation. I will go back to employment for students. Students of our generation had tremendous ongoing employment opportunities. It was really very easy. You could drive taxi or work behind a bar; there were no unions. Students today face a much more complex situation. Perhaps the colleges and universities could provide them with leadership and, once they were set up, they could do it themselves. They could organize themselves into groups of people who could supply services and so forth all the way through.
Could you tell us what you think of the impact of ongoing employment on education outcomes and how you could organize ongoing employment opportunities?
Mr. Levin: Well, in terms of student employment generally, we know that more students are employed than used to be the case. This is true in high schools and in post-secondary institutions. Students' reasons for working are multiple, one being to pay tuition at the post-secondary level. Other reasons include lifestyle choices, experience, the desire for independence and autonomy. There are many reasons that people work beyond their actual requirement to have income. I do not think we want to consider employment as only in the narrow sense of paying the costs of getting an education because there might be other reasons.
I am a strong proponent of work-study programs. Ordinarily, I am not in favour of wage subsidy programs because they tend to be ineffective and have a displacement effect on employment. Wage subsidy programs that support post- secondary institutions in hiring students to do work related to their studies or support local community groups or businesses in hiring students to do work relevant to their studies are quite a different matter from straight employment wage subsidy programs because they have a beneficial educational effect as well.
There is room to do some interesting things around expanding employment opportunities. In particular, all community colleges and universities have many areas where they could engage students usefully. With some support, there could be quite a bit of synergy. In graduate schools, doctoral students are financed and earn money while working on their studies. It is quite a nice way to do it. There is no reason for us not to do that at the undergraduate level or in community colleges.
Senator Keon: Is it damaging academically for students to work too much?
Mr. Levin: I have not seen evidence on tertiary education. In secondary education, the evidence suggests that employment of up to 20 hours per week does not have much impact on educational outcomes but beyond that it does. The regular problem we have in those studies is: Which is the cause and which is the effect? It may be that the students who work more are the students who are less engaged with their education at the outset and so they choose to work more.
There is no question that if we had a better financial aid package, students would be in a better position to make choices about how to allocate their time. Then we would have a better impact.
I do not know your answer to the question for tertiary education. In secondary, it is curvilinear. After a certain amount of work, it is negatively related to outcomes.
The Chair: We have our own former university president on the committee, Senator Ogilvie from Nova Scotia, former President of Acadia University.
Senator Ogilvie: Actually, I started my career at the University of Manitoba.
You have given an interesting presentation. Obviously, it is a fascinating subject and an extremely complicated one. You mentioned that you did not drill down into a lot of the issues. However, in this area, I think a lot of conclusions that have affected the education system have been based on the gross view of the issue. They have not recognized the underlying issues that have a great impact. It is such a broad and complex field; it is not easy to do that.
I will try to reduce my questions to three specific questions. Your efforts in Manitoba looked at trying to bring the average debt load down to close to your target of $5,000 per student per year. You mentioned an average of $6,000. Is that the average debt of students who have debt or is that the average debt of all students in the Manitoba system?
Mr. Levin: That is the maximum debt that any student could incur. Actually, Manitoba has low levels of borrowing and of debt relative to other provinces.
Senator Ogilvie: Thank you for making that point. It is an important issue that often distorts the debate. Figures that I used to operate on indicated that, in general, roughly 50 per cent of Canadian post-secondary education students had no debt. The average debt figures quoted are generally average debt of those students who have debt.
Mr. Levin: That is also correct. However, the $6,000 was a maximum.
Senator Ogilvie: I will try to focus my second question again because it is a broad subject and it is probably not easy to answer. It is universally recognized that there appears to be a clear financial benefit of post-secondary education. Those who have it and are in the workforce have a higher average income than those who do not in most studies.
Mr. Levin: Correct.
Senator Ogilvie: I will try to come to the question of how that salary directly relates to the post-secondary education experience.
We know in many fields that it has been reasonably easy to appear to tie post-secondary income to the post- secondary education experience. However, is it easy to draw that conclusion overall? Are you aware of any definitive study showing that calculations on post-secondary income can truly be tied across the board to the actual post- secondary experience?
Many of those people would have been able to enter the workforce irrespective of the degree program they completed because of other circumstances.
Mr. Levin: The point is well taken. Within any group of persons with a set of credentials, there will be a large variation in earnings. Even areas highly credentialed like medicine or law have highly variable earnings profiles. Some people will make much more income than others with the same credentials. We talk about averages, and that will have a distorting effect. You need to look at averages and distribution.
A colleague in the Netherlands once described this nicely to me at a conference. He said that post-secondary education is like any other investment. There is a risk associated with it. Every investment has a risk.
For some people, they will invest in post-secondary education and they will get no return on that investment for whatever reasons. There are many different reasons one could imagine. Most people will get a return. For some people the return will be huge; for most people, the return will be around the average; and for some people, there will be no return at all. That is why I propose there should be a floor or protection for students. So those who do not get the return do not end up with a high level of debt and no way to pay it off.
It is absolutely the case that for any given level of education, the returns will be highly variable.
Senator Ogilvie: In your document, and you referred to it in your comments, you indicated that it is not desirable for individual institutions to be able to set tuition fees at any level they choose. I understood that you recommended it for Manitoba. Were you referring specifically to Manitoba?
Mr. Levin: Yes.
Senator Ogilvie: Or do you mean that in a general sense?
Mr. Levin: The report was written for the Government of Manitoba and that was the recommendation. I would say, in general, that I would not be in favour of deregulated tuition. Institutions will naturally and reasonably choose the path on tuition that will maximize their revenues. However, the path that will maximize revenues for individual institutions will not necessarily be optimal for overall participation.
Senator Ogilvie: Do you not begin to get into the issue of indicating that you see all Canadian post-secondary education institutions as part of a state or national system? Many of those institutions have individual and private charters that would allow them to be private institutions were they to choose to go that route.
Mr. Levin: Yes. An institution has every right to go that route, but it does not have the right to expect the public to subsidize it in choosing that route.
Senator Ogilvie: I was sure that was the interpretation, but the comment is very specific. We have a highly differentiated background situation. I take your point.
Mr. Levin: I am not arguing that every institution should have the same level of tuition or that there should not be any variation. There should be a band. Institutions should have room to adjust their tuition levels. That is a good thing. My view is that they should not have unlimited room to adjust their tuition levels.
Senator Eaton: I would like to talk about your targeted programs and mentorship.
From the witnesses we heard last week, high school seems to be a large hump. Once we can get the students over the hump and into universities, there is a difference. Should universities proactively do targeting programs in high schools?
Then once young people get to university and decide they want to go into arts, engineering or medicine, should they not have some kind of counselling then and there in the first year saying, "You think you want to be a chartered accountant, but looking at your marks and your interests, you might be better in arts or psychology."
We have also heard about the huge drop off. Kids get into university and are discouraged, fail or simply do not see the benefits and they drop out. Should they not have some kind of counselling directed at what they are taking and how they are doing?
Mr. Levin: I would agree with both those points.
As I indicated, there are already a lot of interesting things that community colleges and universities do in the area of student recruitment. This includes recruiting non-traditional students. There is much more that could be done in those areas.
Let me speak for a minute about the experience I know well in Manitoba around access programs. These programs began in the early 1970s. The idea was that we needed to train more Aboriginal teachers and social workers to work in northern Manitoba. Few people were graduating from those high schools.
The program essentially went to communities and looked for adults who we thought, although they did not have the qualifications, had the motivation and capacity to be successful. The program recruited those people and supported them once they got there with counselling and tutoring. We redesigned some courses so that students would have more time to do them. We did this because they would not have the background. For example, students would come into pre-med with almost no science. You could not put them into first year organic chemistry. You needed a 12-month program in which you first do the things that they would have needed to begin organic chemistry, following which they can do organic chemistry.
Those programs produced approximately 50 per cent graduation rates. That 50 per might not seem like much. However, when you consider that none of these people would have been admitted to the university under normal circumstances and were now graduating from law, medicine, engineering, social work or education, it is pretty impressive. Where you put together the package of supports, which is counselling and tutoring, you can attain high success rates. Tutoring is important because we need to help people who do not have the academic skills develop those skills.
I would say the same about high schools. Mentoring is important. Getting students onto the campuses of universities and community colleges is important. In that way, they can see what that place is about, giving them the sense that they could be there.
One of the good things that has happened in this country in the last while is that many colleges and universities have increased the profile of Aboriginal students and Aboriginal studies on campuses. Aboriginal kids who come to a campus now see it as a place where they could belong as opposed to a place where they do not recognize anything.
Senator Eaton: To follow up on that, what about kids who have learning disabilities? Is there adequate support in most universities for kids? I am not talking about serious learning disabilities. I am talking about people who are slightly dyslexic or have trouble writing.
Are there enough programs to keep those people who might have the IQ levels but not necessarily the mechanical skills?
Mr. Levin: There are probably never enough programs. Many colleges and universities have made some heroic efforts in that regard: changing policy, providing accommodations and supports. I am sure that everyone who is managing a post-secondary institution would tell you that there is more they could do and would be prepared to do under the right circumstances.
My general view of this is that we do not have a shortage of people with capacity. Everything we know says there is more capacity than we ever tap. Every time we raise the bar on what people are capable of, if we provide the right supports, we find out that many more people can achieve higher levels than we thought they could.
About 50 years ago, we thought that 50 per cent high school graduation was ambitious and that most other kids did not have the capacity to finish high school. We now think our high school graduation rates should be 90 per cent. Tertiary participation would have been 10 per cent 50 years ago. Already, there were complaints we were letting in too many students and they did not have the skills. We are now at 30 or 35 per cent and we could be higher still.
Everything we know says that, given the right motivation and supports, many more people could be successful than we typically think is the case. We underestimate people's capacity.
Senator Cordy: You have given us some fascinating things to think about.
I am interested in your comments about protection from catastrophe. We have already said that about half the students, for one reason or another, do not have debt. Most of those who have debt have managed it reasonably well. However, the ones we read about in the paper are the catastrophic situations which are riveting stories to hear about. Certainly one feels extremely sorry for the people who are in those situations for whatever reason, which may include illness or this economy, for example, where they are getting only part-time jobs.
You made reference to something earlier; namely, you cannot apply for bankruptcy protection for a number of years. There was a bill that did not get through the Senate proposed by Senator Goldstein to reduce the number of years before being allowed to apply for bankruptcy. There were also bills in the House of Commons but they were never passed.
Could you go into more detail about how it would work? It sounds like a good idea but how would you work it for those in that unfortunate situation?
Mr. Levin: First, it is a small number of students. It appears that about 10 per cent of all students have any difficulty managing their debt. That is already a small number. Most of those can be managed in one way or another.
There is now an interest relief program that the Canada Student Loan Program operates. As I understand it, it is being redesigned because no one took it up because it was so complicated to apply that, basically, people gave up. I do not know if the new one is in place. It might be. It is being redesigned with the idea that it would be easier. That might get us close to where we need to be.
If we were in a position to say to students that there is a floor through which you cannot fall, that would have a minimal cost. It would have to be an individual application situation because circumstances are so different. I do not think there is any other way to administer it than through an application process, but there are a lot of ways of getting students into that process. For example, where there is default on loan, there could be some sort of trigger to have a review. You would need some kind of panel process for reviewing individual circumstances.
It would involve quite a small number of students because there would have to be some triggers for it. I think it would have a small cost. However, as you point out, those stories have a huge public impact. We want to try to eliminate those, which would encourage lots of people who are wavering to think that it is something they should and could do; that it is reasonable for them to borrow for their future.
Senator Cordy: You are right. There are students who are wavering and whose family's financial situation is such that they know they will have to be borrowing the maximum amount. The $6,000 a year as a maximum debt that you suggested would help to alleviate that.
The challenge in government, is that when you make any type of plan, it tends to be a "one size fits all." You mentioned a panel. How would you work around that? I have heard stories in Nova Scotia where people have tried to go bankrupt; they are not able to do so and have attempted suicide. In some cases, they were successful. It really is something that we should be looking at.
Mr. Levin: Most provinces currently have processes for students to appeal; they have a student aid award. You apply under the student aid system and you are put through a relatively mechanical process in which we calculate this and that. It spews out a number and that is what you get.
However, in most provinces, students can write a letter and say, "Look, you need to take into account X or Y that is not on your form but which is in my life." In most settings, because it is a small number of cases, those are reviewed on one-by-one basis and changes may be made to the loan award.
I do not see any reason why one could not do anything similar at the back end of the process. We would say to students, "If you are in a position where you cannot discharge your debt" — and there could be other triggers, such as the size of the loan and so on — "there is a review process. If there are good grounds why you cannot meet your obligations, there would be a variety of adjustments," ranging from deferral, to loan forgiveness, et cetera. This which would allow students to repay their debt to the extent possible, but would protect them from a position where they cannot repay or discharged and are stuck.
Good grounds for not meeting debt obligations might include catastrophic illness, family sickness, having to look after a sick parent or child, loss of job, et cetera.
Senator Cordy: Yes, in most situations, there are circumstances out of their control.
I want to discuss tuition fees having little or no effect on whether people attend university. This is nothing new to us; we have heard about it in this committee. However, every time I have a student group come to my office to talk to me, if it is not the No. 1 issue they talk to me about, it is certainly the second or third. Looking at increases in tuition is always a concern.
You have said that it should not be going through the roof; increases should be moderate. Could you go on in more detail about that?
Mr. Levin: This was certainly a big issue for the students who participated in the Manitoba commission. At one point, I said to the people from the Canadian Federation of Students: "Help me out, then. Show me one empirical study, anywhere in the world, that says if we make tuition significantly lower, we would improve equity of participation in post-secondary. Show me one." Of course, there are none. There are literally none. All the empirical evidence is on the other side.
Having said that, students do want predictability. When you enter a four-year program, you want to know that it is not suddenly going to cost you 25 per cent more in year three or four.
Alberta has had an interesting process in which they have had kind of a negotiated corridor of fees. They sit down with students at a provincial level and say, "All right, over the next three years, it will go up by X and Y." There is a kind of announcement of that, so a student who begins a program can know what their four years of tuition will be.
The issue around tuition is that it is typically 20 or 30 per cent of the total cost of going to school. It can be a little higher if you are a single student living at home. For students who are on their own, and for students with dependents or with foregone income, it could be less than 10 per cent of the total cost of going.
If you take 30 per cent of your cost and increase it by 2, 3 or 4 per cent, it does not add much to your total cost. That is why tuition is not the decisive factor. However, finances altogether are important.
I understand where students are coming from on this. Of course, they would like to pay less tuition. I just do not think there is a good argument to be made for it from a public policy perspective.
Senator Stewart Olsen: One statement you made that surprised me was the two provinces that had the fewest graduates from high school, which I would have thought would be among the highest.
For Alberta, with all of their economy, I could kind of see there are good, high paying jobs so why finish high school. However, Quebec puts a lot of effort into its high school education and keeping kids in school. Do you have an answer for that?
Mr. Levin: Quebec recently had a commission looking at their high school dropout issue. I am trying to remember the name the chair, but I cannot. It was led by a Quebec business person.
I know about this because while I was deputy in Ontario, we made a major and quite successful effort to increase our high school graduation rate. We do know how to do that. We have increased the Ontario rate by 9 percentage points; we have 14,000 or 15,000 more kids a year graduating than we did five years ago.
The Quebec commission recommended something similar. What is interesting in Quebec is that they have one fewer year. They have only 11 years of education and yet they still have quite a high non-completion rate. I believe it is roughly 30 per cent non-completion in secondary schooling. I do not know enough about the Quebec system to know why that is; I do know that it is a big policy concern for the Government of Quebec.
Senator Stewart Olsen: It is a surprise to me.
My other thought is that while I like a lot of what you are saying, if you start a lot of these programs in first year university, we are not going to achieve what we are trying to do. One portion of university is to bring young adults and treat them as young adults. Should these programs not start in the last year of high school? Or you may want to have a transition year rather than begin in your first year of university, where you are really looking at young adults beginning to manage for themselves?
Mr. Levin: There are many models that could be useful here, there are many different ways this could be done. I certainly believe that the effort to increase aspirations and to get young people, or not so young people, thinking about post-secondary education can happen much earlier. Many of those aspirations are shaped as early as 14 and 15.
When you talk to young people about their aspirations in Canada, overwhelming numbers of them at the age of 14 or 15 see themselves going on to post-secondary education. Seventy per cent, 80 per cent, as many as 90 per cent of parents expect their children to go on to post-secondary education in this country.
The aspiration is there. It starts to collide with reality as kids get older. When they hit 15, 16 and 17, perhaps they are struggling in high school or have family issues and other things happening. That is when the aspirations start to drop. That is the critical point where you attach people to mentors, to better supports and counselling — or even to coming back later. I do not want to lose the adult side of this.
In Manitoba, one of things that happened while I was there was that we ended up creating a network of adult learning centres. It was all for the wrong reasons but with a good result.
Those adult learning centres provided thousands of adults who could not see a way to get back into formal education with the opportunity not only to complete their secondary, but in many cases to start on their tertiary education. Many of them ran dual credit programs, especially with our community colleges. It was great to see adults who had given up on school say, "I have been out of school for 15 years but I want my kids to finish, so I have to finish."
When you provide the opportunity for people to do that, you do not just have a positive effect on the adults; you have a positive effect on their children and their children's children. I do not want to lose the adult side of this either as part of the picture. However, you are right in saying you do not just want to do this once people hit tertiary, you want to start putting that in their minds at earlier ages.
Senator Stewart Olsen: Can you give me some examples of the outreach programs you initiated in Manitoba?
Mr. Levin: Sure, and these have been done in many parts of country.
For example, when Lloyd Axworthy became president of the University of Winnipeg, he made a commitment to do more around inner city and Aboriginal kids. They have a set of things they do, where the university goes into high schools, encourages kids to come to meetings and bring their parents. People from the university come. If it is a predominantly Aboriginal community, they often will have an elder or some kind of Aboriginal ceremonial part connected to it.
They start to connect kids with the University of Winnipeg as an institution. They tell kids in Grade 9: "If you complete high school and qualify, we have a scholarship for you when you get here." This is another way of starting to make people see it is something they could do.
There are lots of things — mentoring programs and summer camps in which kids in remote and rural areas come and spend a week on a campus. They work with researchers and instructors and get a sense of what it is people do in those places.
If you think of the experience of growing up in a small rural community, and then coming to a large city to a big campus where nobody knows you — going from a place where everybody knows you to a place where nobody knows you or will talk to you unless you talk to them — this is overwhelming for many students. It is pretty simple to organize things like buddy programs to match incoming students with senior students, maybe from similar communities so people have a sense of someone looking after them. There are many examples like this, many of which are inexpensive to do.
The Chair: Senator Pépin had a supplementary question based on this last dialogue.
[Translation]
Senator Pépin: My colleague's first question dealt with education in Quebec.
Mr. Levin: That is correct.
Senator Pépin: Clément Lemelin, a retired UQAM professor, has said that perhaps we should alter the funding approach, because the nerve centre of universities is now research, and not education, and that is where universities target their funding. He argues that in order to reverse this trend, students rather than universities need to be funded. Accessibility should be improved and more scholarships should be offered. This would bring the education component back into the universities. How do you feel about that?
[English]
Mr. Levin: I would say it is rarely that simple. I am in favour of students paying a share of the cost. One reason I am in favour of that is that it does give students a greater ownership in the institution.
Where institutions have set out to increase fees, in some cases they have negotiated that with students; and part of the quid pro quo has been students want a bigger say in governance. I think that is a quite a good thing. I think that giving students a larger voice in the institutions would help increase the impact of the importance of teaching.
Institutions vary quite a bit in the amount of attention they pay to this. Paying more attention to the welfare of students means more than just paying greater attention to teaching. I am talking about the welfare of students generally. Institutions need both support and pressure to do more than focus on teaching, because the natural logic inside universities and, to some extent inside community colleges, pushes them to do the opposite. They are pressured to be more prestigious and more exclusive because that is where the rewards are in that world.
We need a set of incentives. One of those could be student voice, and already is, to some extent. We could do other things around that as well. For example, we should have more obvious public information around the success rates for students in different institutions. Students should know that what proportion of students actually complete and succeed at which programs at which institutions and what happens to them afterwards. There is a mechanism through which students would have more information, which would also increase their voice.
In general, I agree that we want to look at ways in which the student presence could be made more important. I would not agree that the best or only way to do that is to have them pay more fees. Conceptually speaking, higher fees and more supports is not a bad policy strategy. Of course, in Canada in the 1990s, we had higher fees and fewer supports, which was not good.
Senator Dyck: I was from the University of Saskatchewan. I live in Saskatoon and spent most of my life at the University of Saskatchewan either as a student or a professor or a researcher. It is difficult for me not to brag about the great job we are doing there with all the programming for Aboriginal students. As an Aboriginal person, the subject is near and dear to my heart. I believe you said something to the effect that the inequities in post-secondary education were greater in the 1990s.
Mr. Levin: They became greater during the 1990s.
Senator Dyck: Is that because we had a recession in the 1990s? What were the factors?
Mr. Levin: In the 1990s, we had significant increases in tuition and significant decreases in other forms of student aid.
Senator Dyck: If the current recession were to continue, would it have a greater impact on the students in terms of their ability to finance their education?
Mr. Levin: Very possibly it could have an effect. It will depend on many policy choices made by the government around funding students and funding the institutions and on the availability of employment of course.
Senator Dyck: I grew up in a family that had no money. The saving grace for us was the availability of summer jobs. I was fortunate enough to work as a research assistant after my second year. I worked in the department of chemistry and biochemistry and so on. Should programs be directed to providing funds to universities so that they are able to offer more direct summer employment to their students? Certainly, in my case, it was a critical feature.
Mr. Levin: I would be in favour of that, not just for universities but also for community colleges; and not just for summer employment but also for employment during the year. For example, many researchers would welcome having students to work on their projects. I would not restrict it to the colleges and universities. There could be useful partnership between the institutions and community groups.
Senator Dyck: I studied mostly sciences and tend to think in terms of lab-oriented jobs. Certainly, there are interesting jobs that could be partnered with community groups, for example in law.
The other big factor for student success was the so-called weeding-out classes. In the science program, the first year math course was one such course. Some university departments bragged about the failure rate in the first-year math course. What about those kinds of courses? What is the responsibility of universities to ensure that there is proper teaching of the curriculum and that the focus is on the student success rate, not on the student failure rate?
Mr. Levin: It is a very peculiar thing about universities. At times, I have likened it to a business that brags about the many products they have that are defective. If a business did that, it would be bankrupt in no time. The goal in every business is zero defect and 100 per cent quality outcome. That is how you make money. Imagine a hospital that said: We have high standards because we do not admit many people and those that are too sick, do not make it out. No one from a hospital would say such a thing with pride and yet educational institutions brag about the failures. There is a kind of double standard.
This is not only a feature of the institutions but also a public perception problem. In Ontario we were quite successful in increasing our high school graduation rate, but the media have said that our graduation rate is up because our standards are down. There seems to be an assumption that if the success rate is going up, then the standards are falling. The institutions find themselves in that kind of trap. I completely agree that we want to help people to be successful, and we know a lot about how to do that.
Senator Dyck: With respect to Aboriginal students, some of the people that I spoke to some years ago talked about the difficulty that Aboriginal students had in finding programs that suited, inspired and motivated them. Has anyone collected statistics on Aboriginal or other students who enter university, take many courses but never graduate because the selected courses did not meet the degree requirements? This was a problem for Aboriginal students at one time but I do not know if it still is.
Mr. Levin: I am not aware of any evidence on that, I am sorry.
Senator Dyck: I have another question with regard to Aboriginal students. There is a big gender difference among students who go on to post-secondary education, whether university or college. Should we pay attention to that?
Mr. Levin: Yes. There is a big gender difference generally in post-secondary education, which is another interesting area.
I spoke earlier about expectations. About 150 years ago, men thought that giving advanced education to women was a waste of time. That turned out to be a mistaken point of view. Today, university enrolments are dominated by women, and that is becoming a concern. We have to ask: Who is not going to post-secondary? Who is not succeeding? Why are they not here? What can we do about it? The goal is to help people to be successful.
Senator Dyck: Universities might be dominated by women at the undergraduate level but not at all levels. In Aboriginal education, it is the women who are going to universities.
Senator Callbeck: You have given us many great ideas and much good information.
I will go back to debt, which Senator Cordy talked about. I believe you said that roughly 10 per cent of students cannot manage their debt. Yet, the graph I have shows that 25 per cent of students who do not go say that financial barriers are the reason and 16 per cent of students who leave say that they are concerned about the huge debt.
Now I know in your recommendations to Manitoba that you recommended the amount of debt should be capped, and you talked about $6,000. Has Manitoba brought that in?
Mr. Levin: Effectively, yes. When I was deputy minister in Manitoba we made an agreement with the Canadian Millennium Scholarship Foundation, which was newly created. A number of provinces took the CMSF money and used it to reduce provincial expenditure on student aid. In Manitoba we agreed to match the CMSF money. The result was we had a huge reduction in the amount of debt because Manitoba has relatively low borrowing. We were essentially able to say that except for students in very high-cost programs, which is quite a small number of students, a student going to a Manitoba college or university would have their debt capped at $6,000 per year. Yes, that was done.
Now, with the demise of CMSF, I do not quite know what the situation will be. When I completed this report, the arrangements for the new Canada student grant were not entirely in place. Whether Manitoba will be able to retain that policy, given the new cost-sharing arrangement with the federal government, I do not know. However, that was in place for five or six years in Manitoba for the overwhelming majority of students.
Senator Callbeck: Has that made a huge difference in the numbers of students going?
Mr. Levin: I would say no, not a huge difference. Participation and equity of participation increased, but my point is that we will not really get participation and equity changes only through financial instruments.
Senator Callbeck: You mentioned about the lack of information for students and parents. I believe you said improve information and communication so that students and families really understand what is involved and regard the costs and the benefits of post-secondary education.
What is Manitoba doing about that? What were your recommendations?
Mr. Levin: My recommendations were that they create an independent source of information for students on what all the program options cost, both tuition and other costs, and what the typical earnings profile is for people who complete those credentials. That would be available online and available to high schools through counsellors, there would be also CD versions and print versions.
In the same way in most provinces now, a student can go on to the student aid system and plug in a few numbers and get the amount of they will probably get in the way of a loan or a grant. That takes about two minutes. You could do something similar. You could go on a website and say if I went into education, what would it cost me for tuition and housing? I could indicate things such as whether I live with my parents or not, and whether I have children or not. It would give me an average cost and show what I would earn if I got a job as a teacher. It could show how much my debt would be and what it might take me to pay it over X number of years at X amount of interest, in the same way you can get that on any bank's mortgage calculator.
You would be able to do that with different scenarios. You could also find out what other programs look like. That would be a simple tool and could be built and maintained by a third party as an independent source. It would not be a particularly expensive thing to do and could be made available to every high school. That in itself would provide people a ready made information source.
When university or college counsellors were running sessions with students or parents, for example, you could put it up on a big screen and show people how it would work. That would be a simple thing that could be done that would probably be quite helpful.
Senator Callbeck: How do we motivate students to go online and get that information?
Mr. Levin: I think you motivate them in lots of ways. If high school teachers and counsellors have access to it, they will put it in front of students. Students could be made aware of it, colleges and universities can advertise it as something students might want to look at, in the same way as we do other information tools. It is all part of a program of outreach. That tool by itself will only work if there is a broader program of outreach and information-giving around it.
Senator Callbeck: Have you looked at other countries? No doubt you have looked at which countries are having more success in getting their young people to take post-secondary education.
Mr. Levin: Yes.
Senator Callbeck: I see where Finland is one that happens to be up there around 52 per cent. We are roughly 38 per cent. Do you know why Finland is up there, or are there particular reasons?
Mr. Levin: I am not familiar with Finland in particular. The rates of participation data depend a lot on the source. The OECD actually shows Canada as one of the highest countries in terms of participation in post-secondary education. That is actually driven a lot by the cégep system in Quebec, because you have a very large proportion of students in cégep, which counts as post-secondary. Many of these in other provinces would still be in high school and not count as post-secondary. Nonetheless, the Canadian participation rate is pretty good.
I have looked at other countries because we are always hearing Ireland this or Finland that or whatever. I would say that each country has a unique set of cultural, social and economic circumstances that shape its context and it is very dangerous to borrow just one piece out of another system.
Canada has a particular model, which is that we have fairly high tuition and fairly high levels of support and fairly high participation. Some countries have very low levels of participation and almost no support. There are all kinds of different models that work in different circumstances, in different ways. I would say that it is always interesting to learn from other places, but what we really ought to be doing is asking where we are now and how do we get better in a way that is actually feasible for us.
Senator Munson: I have one question and I would like to follow on on what Senator Eaton was exploring in learning disabilities and take it another level. I want to follow on with your three questions: Who is succeeding; why they are not here; and what can we do about it.
I work closely in the autistic community and I work closely with those with intellectual disabilities, the Special Olympians. I have met many families from Whitehorse to St. John's and talked with them. A great deal of investment is being made into helping them get their high school education, depending on what part of the spectrum they are on. At one point they get there and it is a great sacrifice. Now you talked about scholarships with Aboriginal groups and so on. Are universities doing enough in to allow that person with autism or certain intellectual disabilities to walk through that door comfortably? As you know, the statistics show the incidence of autism is just astounding.
In a uniform way, a consistent way across the country, are universities offering that scholarship, mentoring and giving that individual the opportunity to get more education? They do not need to do basket weaving or that sort of thing, because they have done well to get to grade 12. They are saying they do not need a babysitter, they need more education.
At this committee we have had people with university educations, autistic men and women, who have talked to us about this, and it is in our report Pay Now Or Pay Later.
Mr. Levin: There is a lot of merit to that view. As I said earlier, we typically underestimate what people are capable of and when we give people chances and supports we usually find that more people are capable of more than we expected. That is my starting point. In that sense, if you are asking are we doing enough, the answer will inevitably be no, there is more that could be done.
I would say that the post-secondary education world was a pretty exclusive world until quite recently, maybe 20, 25 years ago, when we actually started to think of people with physical disabilities, such as blind and deaf students. We did not have much accommodation. Now it is pretty good in many institutions, so you can have an aide come in with you, you can have your exams done orally. Technology has made a big difference. There are new disability groupings where there could be an equivalent level of progress that has not yet been made.
The simple answer to your question — academics rarely give simple answers — is of course we could do more.
Senator Munson: Would scholarships and that kind of incentive be something as well? Students, on the generic level, strive for something better.
Mr. Levin: In my view, it is the combination of personal and financial supports. I would put the personal supports ahead of the financial supports. We can give money to get them there. If they do not then have the support to be successful, then we have not really done them a favour by bringing them there.
The question they ask is: "When I get there, is there someone there who recognizes the kind of person I am? Is there a willingness to adapt the procedures, not to reduce the quality, so that I can achieve in a different way?" Those are the issues that are more important than the financial ones.
Senator Callbeck: I want to ask you about a recommendation here from the Canadian Federation of Students. Their number two recommendation concerns Statistics Canada. No doubt, you have dealt with a lot of statistics in this whole area. They are saying that the data on Aboriginal students in colleges is particularly scarce. Their recommendation is increased funding for the Statistics Canada branch responsible for the collection and analysis of post-secondary education statistics.
Will you agree with that recommendation? Do you think our statistics are inadequate to analyze?
Mr. Levin: Education statistics are always a challenge in Canada because we have a provincial-territorial system, and each province and territory has different definitions. University issues are difficult but college issues are more difficult because the college program models are more diverse.
Basically universities tend to have degree programs; they are three years or four years or they are graduate programs and they are fairly similar in that regard from one institution to another. College programs can range from a few weeks to a few months, to two or three years. They carry a wide variety of different kinds of credentials and so there has been a huge difficulty in putting together consistent data in Canada on our community colleges.
As well, colleges in some provinces are running university transfer programs and colleges in other provinces are not. Likewise, some give degrees and some do not. Our community colleges are highly variable, which is always a statistical challenge.
Yes, it would be useful to know more about that. When it comes to particular groups, such as Aboriginal people, ethnic minority groups, of course we have the challenges around human rights and voluntary disclosure. Ontario has made a big effort in our schools it build relationships with Aboriginal people so we can actually get data on their school performance. British Columbia has done quite well in that regard.
In tertiary education, there are lots of issues around that. It is almost never just a matter of money. It is a matter of having the capacity to create better data.
Senator Callbeck: Okay. Thank you.
The Chair: Let me ask you about something you mentioned a couple of times: Floor. As I understand it, only a small number of people run into financial difficulties. However, for them there is a lot of reality and a lot of problems and sometimes the cause may be unforeseen or a sudden disability.
You said we need to create a floor to help deal with that reality. I also sense you are saying that equally or more important is creating the perception that there is a safety net there. You think this would help in terms of getting people into the system who are scared of these kinds of things, who fear these things.
What mechanism would you use to provide that floor?
Mr. Levin: I would use two mechanisms.
Let me say first that there is a debt adversity issue: There is some evidence to show that lower income groups are most reluctant to borrow to finance their education. They are the least likely to see the investment value. As well, of course, it has greater risk for them because they do not have the wherewithal to finance it. These are people who are not used to borrowing money for things in the future. Therefore you want to try and reduce debt adversity and that is part of the public relations value, if I can put it this way, of doing that. Absolutely, it is symbolically important as much as practically important.
In terms of the actual mechanisms I would say there are two main mechanisms. The first one is to cap borrowing. If you said the most you are going to need to borrow is $5,000 or $6,000 per year for full-time study, that in itself creates kind of a floor. We would not have students who are borrowing $8,000, $9,000 and $10,000 a year and ending up with $40,000 and $50,000 in debt. The rest of their need would be met through another means.
The second thing is the disaster protection. That means being able to tell people that they will not be put into a disastrous situation if, through no fault of their own, or even through some fault of their, they have a big debt that they cannot pay. We need to prevent situations where people are 22 or 23 years old and their economic futures are crippled because they have no credit rating, and where they will not ever be able to buy a house. There has to be an appeal mechanism in which such situation can be resolved and people can put themselves back on a reasonable economic footing.
Obviously that needs to be done in a way that does not encourage people to walk away from legitimate debts. I do not see any reason why that would be impossible or even particularly difficult to do.
The Chair: It sounds like from you are saying in the latter case — the catastrophic case — that some sort of insurance program might apply. There is also the broader question of who underwrites this. Would it be partly an insurance program and partly government? If you said the ceiling was $6,000 would it be government underwriting that?
Mr. Levin: It could be. There are different ways it would be financed, and I actually have not thought through the policy mechanisms in detail.
Originally I had in mind a kind of insurance model, like fire insurance, for example. Everyone would pay a premium and the premium would compensate you for your house burning down, but most people's houses would not burn down so they would pay and would not collect. It is not a bad model.
The critical thing to me is that the cost of this will be very low. We are putting out $900 million or $1 billion a year in student loans; 90 something per cent of that will be repaid without much difficulty by people.
Senator Ogilvie: I would like to follow up on this last exchange because what I heard you saying during your presentation and in your answering of other questions was that the capping of debt needed to be tied into careful analysis and support.
As you start moving into an insurance program, in one's mind one moves away from what I thought I heard you talking about, which is the very specific, very detailed and very careful analysis of the individual case with regard to that debt before you absolve them of the issue. Insurance begins to move to another thing and I would suggest to you that one would need to be extremely careful given the entrepreneurial capability of young people in that age group.
Mr. Levin: Sure. Insurance companies also have a certain level of diligence before they pay a claim. You would want to have some criteria so that this could not easily become a dodge, absolutely.
The Chair: Getting money out of insurance companies is like pulling teeth.
That is it then. Thank you very much Professor Levin; you have been most helpful. I have been a visitor to OISE many times over the years and I do remember some great sessions. The thing I remember the most about OISE is the noise from the subway underneath. It shakes the place and it is a heck of a racket. Maybe you will get that solved one day.
Mr. Levin: Thank you, it has been my pleasure.
(The committee adjourned.)