Quality versus quantity

Header image for Interrobang article CREDIT: CANDIS BROSS
Martin Hicks questions the quality of education post-secondary institutions are providing in favour of a high enrollment rate. This could impact a student's ability to find a job after graduation.

Are high enrollment rates reducing the quality of post-secondary education?

An article coming from the Higher Education Quality Control Council of Ontario (HEQCO) is suggesting schools, including Fanshawe, should consider doing the exact opposite of what they’re currently doing.

The article entitled “Stop (en) Rolling Over” questions whether post-secondary institutions are sacrificing the quality of the education they are providing students in favour of increasing the quantity of students they enroll.

Martin Hicks, author of the article, works at HEQCO researching post-secondary institutions and provides them with advice and recommendations on how to improve. His main recommendation is to switch the focus from quantity of students to the quality of the education being provided.

“We’ve probably paid a lot less attention through all that growth on making sure that the quality and the relevance and the job market connections of our programs [are] also as stellar as our enrollment is,” Hicks said. “We’re saying maybe shift the focus a little bit so that we’re not just focusing on how many people get into the system but also making sure that they are very successful when they come out of the system.”

For the 2015–2016 academic year, Fanshawe College accepted almost 20,000 full-time students and about 26,000 part-time students. With so many more students flooding the halls, it comes to question whether or not Fanshawe is keeping up with providing students with a quality education along with sufficient services to help them get there.

The only way we can measure the success of a college or university for now is by using surveys called Key Performance Indicators (KPI). Ontario Colleges tests five key areas in order to assess the success of a college. The five key areas are graduate employment, graduate satisfaction, employer satisfaction, student satisfaction and graduation rate.

Based on KPI alone, Fanshawe appears to be doing fairly well. Though Colleges Ontario stresses that colleges should not be compared against one another because of a high number of variables, Fanshawe ranks above the provincial average in most tests.

Gary Lima, the VP of academics at Fanshawe, said the college scores well because the staff and faculty consider providing a quality education to be a top priority.

“It’s so important to us, it’s in our DNA, I’d say it’s probably the number one topic of every single meeting that I go to,” Lima said. “If there’s a dominating topic it’s making sure that we have quality programs and that we do everything we can to ensure that students have a quality experience here.”

The KPI survey of 2013–2014 graduates found that 87.5 per cent of Fanshawe grads were employed six months after graduation.

Hicks said it’s important to note that this survey does not specify if the graduates found employment in their field of study, something he said the KPI test should change in their testing in order to present a more accurate reading of a college’s success.

“I think it’s the tougher test and I think [for] most people when they go to college that’s what they’re interested in, they’re interested in coming out and getting a job in a related field,” Hicks said.

One of the questions asked focuses on the services provided by the college. The provincial average is low, scoring only 63.8 per cent of students who said they were “very satisfied” with the overall quality of the services in the college. Fanshawe rated slightly higher than this average at 69 per cent.

The KPI results, all available online on the Ontario Colleges website, are not a perfect test, but they are the best we have for now.

It seems that Fanshawe is keeping up with its expanding student population, but in order to keep this momentum Hicks suggests that administrators put the same amount of care into providing an excellent education as they have in the past.

“We should have a balance, I think we should continue to be and will continue to be leaders in terms of accessibility in terms of sheer numbers of people who have the opportunity to go [to post-secondary], I don’t think we’re going to pull back on that,” Hicks said. “[We should] always be just as attentive or in a balanced way attentive to the quality side.”