Why should post-secondary institutions get public funding if they can’t produce literate graduates or high-impact research?

How many fourth-year university students can correctly find information about holiday bus service from a website when given several links? How many can calculate the right amount of medicine to give to a child when the dosage is based on body weight? What proportion can figure out how much profit a company made from a table containing lists of income and expenses? One would hope the answer is all of them. It’s closer to 40 per cent.

Those are the findings of a new study that aimed to measure the literacy and numeracy gains from an undergraduate degree. Researchers gave standardized tests to 1,040 first-year students and 1,107 final-year students at eight universities in Ontario and found that only three in 10 freshman and four in 10 students in their final year were operating at the skill level required to complete those tasks.

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The Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO), the arms-length government agency that commissioned the research, says that universities have long claimed their graduates gain valuable skills, but those claims are “largely based on inference, opinion, gut feelings or aspirations.” Actually proving that students are learning is necessary, says HEQCO, because “society supports the sector generously so long as it is confident that the sector teaches Ontarians important skills that benefit both the individual and the economy.” They’re right, and the numbers from their study don’t do much for confidence in the system.

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The numbers … don’t do much for confidence in the system

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If most university students on the verge of graduation can’t figure out a transit website and if reams of research is published into an abyss, then it’s time for us to start demanding better outcomes. Why should universities get public funding if they can’t produce literate graduates or high-impact research?

The Ontario Liberals realized there was a problem with quality, and started slowly moving things in the right direction. They created HEQCO in 2005, and eventually began requiring universities to sign Strategic Mandate Agreements (SMAs). SMAs are three-year pacts that are supposed to make sure that universities are pursuing goals that taxpayers support, in exchange for the provincial funding that can make up as much as 45 per cent of their budgets. The problem with the SMAs, however, is that they don’t actually hold universities accountable on the measures that truly matter. They include some measurable goals like the percentage of students who return after freshman year, scores on student satisfaction surveys, and the amount of research funding a university gets, but they don’t demand that universities prove their students have learned any skills or that their professors’ research had an impact.

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It’s time for us to start demanding better outcomes

That’s why Ontario’s next round of Strategic Mandate Agreements, expected in 2020, should require universities to measure student learning and research impact for every program. All students could take the Education and Skills Online (ESO) assessment that HEQCO used in its study, and HEQCO could publish results for each program online. The research impact of individual academic departments could be scored based on how often its professors’ research is cited. This would allow university administrators, students, parents and any other Ontarian to see which programs are working and which are not.

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It would also allow for evidence-based decision-making about which programs to continue funding at a time when Ontario has a $15-billion deficit. If Ryerson’s psychology students aren’t learning anything valuable over four years, then the program’s provincial funding should be cut. If York’s engineering professors are publishing widely cited research and its students are gaining skills, then their request for new labs should be prioritized.

Universities wouldn’t like it. They would fight it bitterly and suggest there’s no fair way to compare programs. But the threat of punishments and rewards tied to real results would force them to improve.

— Josh Dehaas is a Toronto-based writer.