[LINK] "Undergrad focus lets students thrive"

[rfmcdonald]

The Globe and Mail's Elizabeth Church has highlighted an idea that has recently been bubbling up re: graduate schools across Canada (see Paul Wells at MacLean's, here).

Students are the winners when smaller campuses concentrate on undergraduate education and leave graduate studies to large universities, says David Marshall, president of Alberta's Mount Royal College.

Dr. Marshall, who has shifted the focus of the Calgary campus from college diplomas to undergraduate degrees as part of provincewide changes, said defining the roles of institutions makes sense for everyone involved as long as all schools have the same access to funding.

“The result is everyone does a better job,” he said, pointing to the high scores for student satisfaction that small campuses routinely collect on surveys and the performance of their graduates. The danger, he said, is when the role of undergraduate education becomes undervalued and schools devoted to it are given a lesser status.

The roles of Canada's many universities have come to the forefront this summer with the leaders of five research-intensive schools arguing that the country needs an elite group of postsecondary institutions focusing on research and graduate education. International competition and the increasing need to innovate require such measures, they say.

Such a system, they say, also would provide students with more choice in the type of institution they attend.

While some may wish to attend a large, research-intensive school, they should also have more chances to study at small, undergraduate campuses, they say.

The message from the leaders of the universities of British Columbia, Alberta, Toronto and Montreal, and McGill, has started a debate on the need for a national strategy for higher education.

It also has prompted criticism from several university leaders who see it as a play by the big schools for cash.

[. . .]

“This is a really short-sighted approach,” said Jim Turk, executive director of the Canadian University Teachers Association. “Canada can't afford to discourage any great scholars from doing their work.”

Studies conducted in Britain, he said, have found that world-class research is more decentralized than was expected. Likewise, Mr. Turk said, Canada has “important pockets of excellence” that would be endangered under the model put forward by the five university leaders.

Apart from noting that this would definitely create a hierarchy in universities, I'd also like to point out that some universities outside of the top five could easily specialize enough to merit any number of specialty-specific graduate school degree courses--computer science, say, or Island Studies, or ...

Not that this proposal is going to be picked up, of course. I dare these university professors to make Queen's University drop its grad programs. Just let them try. Do they think that all the crowds milling about on Homecoming day, causing havoc and grad press, just disappear? Ha.