OUSA

This has been a whirlwind month of February at Brock University. Like comparable tropical spring break destinations in the southern United States, we too are now covered in a blanket of snow, disappointing the sun-tanners who have been flocking to OUSA’s premiere vacation destination.

Our BUSU elections finished up last week, and I’m proud to welcome OUSA’s newest Steering Committee member, Daud Grewal, to the team. Daud has been a General Assembly delegate over two different years, and brings great energy and enthusiasm to the position.

One of the issues and the he and I will jointly be navigating as my term comes to a close is the issue of University budgets. As regular readers of this blog, or those in-tune with the sector will know, each of our member institutions are going through a budgetary crunch as the institutions try to balance their budgets over a multi-year period. While enrolment continues to rise at Brock and most campuses across Ontario, and tuition has been rising by more than double the rate of inflation, the high costs continue to create budgeting difficulties. Combine this with pension shortfalls, the economic downturn hitting endowments, a provincial government in significant deficit, and the uncertainty coming with the end of the Reaching Higher investment, university administrators are looking for ways to deal with this situation. Last year, Brock’s budget target was closing the gap by 5%, and we ended up coming in at 5.7% through the efforts of all units across the university.

I’ve been careful thus far not to use the word “budget cuts,” even though that’s what most minds would automatically wander to. At Brock, we are in the midst of “budget exercises” looking at not only cuts, but what additional areas of “revenue enhancements” are also possible. Again, many student minds would automatically be alarmed at this prospect, imagining skyrocketing tuition, higher residence prices and greater parking fees. There are, of course, only two major sources of revenue to universities: students and government. If the government is turning off the taps, the burden would naturally fall on the students. However, some of the greatest ideas often come out of tumultuous times. Years ago, at the University of Waterloo, the idea of co-op was borne out of a crunch for space, and not enough faculty to teach all the students. Co-op education has since been emulated worldwide, and is a model for an integrated educational experience.

Last year at Brock, a new program was conceived. Called BOOST (Brock, Offering Opportunities for Successful Turnaround), this program is aimed at students who would otherwise be on academic suspension after their second year of university due to poor performance. This cohort of students, at Brock and elsewhere, is traditionally at the greatest risk of dropping out, as they are not allowed to enrol in courses during their suspension year. BOOST has retained these students on campus, offering a series of workshops, personal development, time-management and other activities, as well as academic rigor. While enrolled in BOOST, students otherwise on suspension are allowed to enrol in a reduced course load.

Is this a great idea? Of course it is! Students-at-risk are being given the help and support they need. Retention rates will increase, and more students will receive the benefit of a university degree.

Does this help out the budget? It does that too. It’s far cheaper to retain existing students than to attract new ones. These students are now taking courses, instead of spending a year away. Brock receives their tuition, the related government BIUs. This one program, one program alone, has prevented $3.1 million in budget cuts. Next year’s “budget exercise” now has a target of 2%, instead of a projected 5%, because of innovative ideas like this. Borne out of budgetary crisis, but amazing results in the right direction, and for the proper reasons.

So as Daud and I motor through my last 2 months in office, I’d love to hear from you. Do you have creative ideas that can improve the educational experience for our students, which also might happen to cost less or attract/retain more students? My door is open, and universities across the province are listening closely.

Rob Lanteigne
VP University Affairs
Brock University Students’ Union

Protecting quality and reversing privatization are the goals of new Ontario University Coalition

TORONTO, Feb. 18 /CNW/ – All front-line groups at Ontario universities – students, staff and faculty – have joined together to put the collective strength of their voices behind a common message: that Ontario’s university system is at a crossroads in providing accessible, affordable, quality education.

In absence of an immediate public investment in higher education, Ontario University Coalition members warn that the affordability, accessibility and quality of Ontario universities will be further threatened.

Ontario lags behind all other provinces in its support for universities. Coalition members will draw on their shared experience and resources to document the deteriorating student experience that results from government under-funding.

The coalition is concerned that inadequate public funding leads to creeping privatization by way of ever-increasing tuition fees and the growing influence of the private sector on our universities ranging from research and teaching to buildings and services. Coalition members say privatization does not reflect the value that generations of Ontarians have placed on a public higher education system.

Coalition members include the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS), the Canadian Union of Public Employees Ontario (CUPE Ontario), the Confederation of Ontario University Staff Associations (COUSA), the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (OCUFA), the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU), the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation (OSSTF), the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance (OUSA), and the United Steelworkers.

The coalition will release a statement about what the university system needs from the 2010 Ontario Budget, but its ultimate focus is the next provincial election, when it aims to make the declining state of Ontario higher education an issue for voters when marking their ballots.

For further information: Graeme Stewart, (416) 979-2117 x232, gstewart@ocufa.on.ca

The Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance (OUSA) believes that students are paying more than their fair share of their higher education, and that the Government of Ontario is placing too great a financial burden onto students.

The Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP) was created to provide loans to help students who do not have the financial means to attend a post-secondary. The provincial government has created a needs assessment model that formulates how much students need for their education, based on what it believes to be reasonable allocations of costs associated with the pursuit of a post-secondary education.

The OSAP funding model therefore delivers its loans based on the needs assessment that the government has prescribed. OUSA’s concern is that the needs assessment formula has not been updated in many years to reflect the current cost of living for students attending a post-secondary institution, as well as a lack of reasonable expectations of students when it comes to food and miscellaneous expenses such as clothing and sundries.

The current needs assessment formula makes no distinction between different regions in Ontario and its cost of living in those places, meaning the system predicts that the cost of a student at the University of Toronto campus living in downtown Toronto, is the same as the cost of living for a student living in Thunder Bay at Lakehead University.

In regards to food expenditure, the formula allocates only $226 per month, for an average of $7.50 per day, or $2.50 per meal. Not only is that amount inaccurate and an unreasonable expectation of young adults, if a student were actually to live on those amounts, they would almost surely not be receiving proper nutrition and eating a regular balanced diet.

This is just one of the many problems with the current OSAP system. Its failures must be highlighted to the government so they will fix it.

OUSA will take on a campaign to highlight the inequities built into the needs assessment formula, and propose educated solutions towards improving it.

During the month of March, a handful of students from across the province will be taking part in our experiment: how to live on $7.50 a day for food. They will be blogging and vlogging about their experience, struggle and challenges of living on the OSAP needs assessment formula. Visit our website frequently for updates and to follow the progress of our participants.

Imagine you’re a professor who wants to improve the way you teach by moving away from the lecture style toward new pedagogies that encourage deep learning. You consult with the experts at your institution, probably found at your local Centre for Teaching and Learning, and learn about new ways to structure your class and new types of projects for your students. You walk into class on the first day, pass out a syllabus, and explain the new structure of your course to your eager audience.

Immediately, the number of students in your class dwindles. You begin to receive complaints that group work is unfair, there’s not enough direction, and no one knows what they’re being marked on. When your students evaluate the class and your teaching, you see a significant drop in your scores. Because lower scores could impact a future promotion or tenure decision, you abandon your innovation and return to more traditional teaching techniques. You’ve become a victim of the system you worked so hard to improve.

This narrative plays out every year at campuses across Ontario. Students are a smart bunch and learn very quickly what it takes to succeed at university and exactly how much (or how little) effort they must put in to get the result they’re looking for. Lacking any understanding of the theory behind learning, many students rebel against innovative teaching that pushes them out of their comfort zones. Why stick with a class where you have to relearn how to be successful? Because a lower mark could impact a student’s future, many students choose to switch classes and return to more traditional teaching techniques. Sounds familiar.

If we’re going to get serious about introducing new pedagogies and supporting deep learning instead of surface learning, it’s not enough to get buy-in from faculty. Something must be done to convince students to step up and engage in new ways of learning. What if first-year orientation programs included some brief information on the benefits of different types of learning environments? What if students who take innovative classes could be marked on a pass/fail basis, thus eliminating their trepidation with trying something new? What if students were required to take a certain number of courses containing a large proportion of new pedagogies?

Whatever the method, more student engagement with these issues is needed.

Alexi White
Executive Director
Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance

For many years OUSA has had the intention of doing some of its own primary research.  Since its inception, the work of the organization has been firmly rooted in thorough research of a secondary nature, i.e. citing many other scholars work as a basis for our own.  This is the foundation for many of the papers, essays and other documents written throughout one’s university career for example.  However, with a wealth of students available to us, doing our own studies would give OUSA the added advantage of speaking with authority on issues that are of particular importance on campuses across the province.

So, about three months ago I set out to three of our universities, Brock, McMaster and Laurier, to conduct focus groups with dozens of students. The topics covered were student financial assistance and the importance of student services.  A great deal of interesting and unique information was learned dealing with both topics.  Some of it was new and surprising, some of it got to the heart of the feelings and emotions behind numbers OUSA always cites.  Other information served to reinforce points that OUSA has been writing about for years.

Highlights from these focus groups will be posted on this website in the coming days, but a big thank you goes out to the steering committee members who made them happen and the participants for taking hours out of their day so OUSA could be represent their issues.

Paul S. Bien
Director of Research and Policy Analysis
Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance

This afternoon, representatives from OUSA will meet with bureaucrats at the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities to discuss the future of Multi-Year Accountability Agreements (MYAAs). Leading the discussion from the student perspective will be Dan Moulton, Rob Lanteigne and Justin Williams, student leaders at Western, Brock and Waterloo, respectively.

Over the past few weeks, OUSA’s vision for a new iteration of MYAAs has solidified into concrete recommendations covering everything from the process for negotiation to specific issues that should be included in the accountability framework.

In a single sentence, OUSA’s vision can be summarized as follows: MYAAs should combine government priorities with institutional strategic plans and seek to hold institutions accountable to openly negotiated objectives and measures, approved by the government and the highest levels of institutional governance, and based on a balance of overarching provincial goals and the local mission and circumstances of the institution.

In addition to specific recommendations for the MYAA framework, OUSA’s vision covers broad issues such as differentiation and data collection and transparency.

The most pressing concern for our students, however, is the lack of student input on previous MYAA negotiations. At Brock University, the Brock University Students’ Union requested to be included in the MYAA process but heard nothing back from their administration. The administration at McMaster University expressed surprise that the McMaster Students Union had even heard of MYAAs. And at Waterloo, the message from the administration has been that MYAAs are meant to be between the institution and the government only.

Students are paying nearly half of the operating budgets of their universities through tuition fees. It’s time to recognize the important role students should play in ensuring the accountability of our institutions.

-Alexi White
Executive Director
Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance (OUSA)

Throughout my years of involvement in Student Government, I have always been disturbed by the lack of depth discussions of educational quality have had. Oftentimes, experts chase after a set of inputs that equal a quality education, as if it were a mathematical problem.

As a representative of over 19,000 undergraduate students, I can tell you concretely that quality is not a mathematical, or even a logical problem at our universities. Firstly, students are more satisfied than dissatisfied with their education. Most Ontario schools score high enough on NSSE to indicate that our schools are not “low-quality”. However, after being a McMaster undergraduate for four years now, I can tell you that something doesn’t feel right about our university experience.

Secondly, there are many factors that go into a quality education. From the teaching ability of one’s instructors, to the state of campus infrastructure, to the extracurricular experience available, the student perception of the overall “quality of education” is affected by a many factors. Some of these factors aren’t even measurable.

Lastly, quality means different things to different stakeholder groups. For students, it means satisfaction with the educational experience. For faculty, it means having the resources to teach effectively. For administrators, it can mean where the institution stands in relation to others.

In order to at least begin to tackle the entirety of the issue, we need to move past trying to define quality, and realize what we are trying to achieve with a “quality education”. I truly believe that outcome is the creation of successful students.

That’s why this year; we’ve spent a great deal of time and effort producing a policy paper on Student Success. The paper seeks to move past the traditional discussions that have bogged down the quality debate. We don’t talk about student-faculty ratios, system overhaul, or differentiation of university missions.

Instead, we are articulating that smaller investments into student services and instructional support programs have the potential to make huge impacts in the student experience. For those students most in need of academic support, robust early-warning systems have the potential to make the difference between dropping out and graduating.

By taking a more holistic and student-centred approach to the quality debate, we hope to see provincial action make a more clear and defining impact on the educational experience. We hope to move past trying to understand the problem, to trying to find solutions for students.

-Chris Martin
Vice President Education
McMaster Students Union

RABBLE.CA LINK

By John Bonnar, February 8, 2010

An organization that represents over 140,000 university students across Ontario on Friday recommended an ambitious agenda of long-term changes that included raising the OSAP (Ontario Student Assistance Plan) maximum to $175 per week, formal instruction in teaching methods and practices to Phd students at a cost of $1 million and regulating tuition fee increases at the rate of inflation.

Dan Moulton, Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance (OUSA) president, said during the provincial government’s pre-budget consultations that “funding is the most important issue facing the post secondary education today.” He said OUSA’s new report, Higher Education: The Engine of Economic Recovery, “presents pragmatic solutions while recognizing the government’s tenuous fiscal solution.”

“Over the past five years, the Ontario government’s Reaching Higher Plan has invested $6.2 billion into the sector, yet much is left to do,” said the report’s authours. “As the government designs a new plan, it is crucial that steps are taken to improve the quality and accessibility of higher education.”

TORONTO, Feb. 5 /OUSA/This week, representatives of the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance (OUSA) were invited to participate in the provincial government’s pre-budget consultations. In speaking before the Standing Committee on Finance and Economic Affairs, Justin Williams, OUSA Vice-President and Vice-President of the Federation of Students at the University of Waterloo, outlined three key priorities for Ontario students: modernizing financial assistance, supporting student success, and restoring a fair and adequate funding model for our universities. OUSA’s accompanying budget submission, entitled Higher Education: The Engine of Economic Recovery, presents pragmatic solutions in each of these key areas while recognizing the government’s tenuous fiscal situation.

“Funding is the most important issue facing the post-secondary education sector today. The government needs to know what students’ priorities are and how to fund them, and OUSA has done that,” said Dan Moulton, OUSA President.

In addition to the formal pre-budget process and ongoing consultations with the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities, OUSA has recently taken these recommendations to policy staff in the Office of the Premier and the Office of Finance Minister Dwight Duncan.

“OUSA has received great feedback from our partners in the sector and from the government about our very practical and essential our suggestions are. We hope the government sees this reality and enacts our recommendations in its budget,” said Moulton.

HIGHER EDUCATION: THE ENGINE OF ECONOMIC RECOVERY – OUSA’S SUBMISSION TO THE STANDING COMMITTEE ON FINANCE AND ECONOMIC AFFAIRS (Click Image to View)
Click to Download

The University of Windsor Students’ Alliance recently held it’s first-ever full scale OUSA Blue Chair Campaign and I am pleased to announce that it was a success. While we are always looking for ways to grow and improve, our team of volunteers – led by Campus Coordinator Madeline MacIsaac – launched a three-day long campaign that will be tough to match.

In the days preceding the campaign, UWSA Councilors such as Aaron Campbell, Laine McGarragle, Kim Orr and Thomas Sasso came together and helped to spread the Blue Chair Campaign message in an effort to raise awareness around the need to expand access to higher education as an equalizer of economic prosperity and social vitality in Canadian society.

From January 18-20, 2010, we enjoyed front-page coverage by The Windsor Star LINK, two stories in uWindsor’s Daily News LINK#1, LINK#2, uWindsor’s The Lance LINK, and were covered during the Monday morning commute by Windsor’s AM800 CKLW and CBC Radio 1 Windsor on the first day of the campaign.

As a result of engaging students in a Speaker’s Corner, our next step is to edit more than 5 Gigabytes of digital video footage into a message that conveys the challenges faced by non-students and students alike to partners in the PSE sector.

Stay tuned!

-Robert Woodrich
Vice President University Affairs
University of Windsor Students’ Alliance