One of the most popular topics involving McMaster recently had to do with its spot on the Times Higher Education World University Rankings for this year. As a university, Mac improved 35 spots from 113 to 78 in the world. This is the largest improvement of any institution in the top 100.
But there are a few stipulations to this that make a substantial difference. There are a number of subcategories that went into this overall rating. Only a few of these are directly relevant to the undergraduate experience.
The area that Mac improved in the most was “Industry Income” from 66.1 to 89.8. This is defined as: “the extent to which businesses are willing to pay for research and a university’s ability to attract funding in the commercial marketplace — useful indicators of institutional quality.”
While you could definitely make the argument that the ability to get funds means that the quality of your education will be better, it is not as direct as the other categories. Without context, this does not differentiate between graduate and undergraduate expenses, and fails to provide any indication about how effectively these funds are used.
For McMaster, this is more of an indication of the construction and purchases the university has made recently. A lot of this will likely not affect you for a few years to come, and that is assuming you have not graduated by that point.
Fortunately, this only takes up 2.5 per cent of the overall grade.
The second best improvement went to “Citations”. This is about how often a university’s published work is cited by scholars globally. An improvement from 82.3 to 89.9, the subcategory takes up a substantial 30 per cent of the overall grade. This is also separated from the subcategory of “Research,” which is another 30 per cent.
These do not directly affect you in any way. In terms of grad school, sure, you would love to work with one of the professors here. The university’s reputation as a research school is better than ever, but there is little to get excited about as an undergraduate besides the fact that construction efforts may eventually pay off.
The only real saving grace of this is that categories that might be applicable to you increased as well. “Teaching” and “International outlook” increased by 2.1 and 1.9, respectively. These increased by less than the three mentioned previously.
Progress is being made for you as an undergrad, but it is not as direct or applicable to you as we should expect. There are improvements being made across the university. You have to take rankings like this at more than face value, and see what actually affects the undergraduate population.
Feel free to enjoy McMaster’s new rank. Just remember to keep demanding more as an undergraduate.
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Patrick Deane, President of McMaster University, highlighted several trends McMaster and higher education will encounter over the next ten years in his talk on Nov. 5 as part of the McMaster Seminar on Higher Education series.
McMaster’s top three priorities over the next few years are to focus on research, specifically integrating research into academia, creating an excellent student experience, and fostering connections both locally and internationally.
However, several trends in higher education will act as barriers that McMaster must overcome to achieve these goals.
The commodification of education and research was among the most troubling of these trends.
“I [do not] dispute that universities have an obligation to contribute to economic growth,” said Deane. “I’m merely trying to draw attention to the fact that as universities have become more central they are held to a model – an economic model – for their operation that is fundamentally hostile to what they’re suppose to do.”
Deane reflected on the founding values of universities, including learning, curiosity-driven research, and a high quality education rather than economic objectives.
For students, this focus on economic profitability translates to their ability to gain employment after graduation.
“It is absurd to think of a young woman in first year, with a life expectancy of probably 86, being under tremendous pressure to make all those career decisions by the age of 21,” said Deane.
Continually, students are attending university for economic benefits rather than intellectual ones.
“It’s very hard for students to do an undergraduate degree now, outside of this framework, and be excited about what the potential for learning is, or what the social impact is that they could have. It is very difficult in a time where all that’s being said to you is career contribution to the GDP.”
While not providing a direct solution to this issue, Deane did offer some solutions to the issue that universities are now mainly pursuing research that benefits governmental or commercial objectives. This can be combated by funding more curiosity-drive research, called basic research. This type of research is exploratory and does not have a specific end goal.
Basic research can be a major contributor to innovation. Deane recalls a conference on the topic of innovation that examined Israel’s investment in basic research in the 1970s, which has now made them a world leader in innovation.
Deane notes that although that specific model may not be perfect for Canada, more emphasis should be placed on basic research.
“What you have to do in Canada is continue to nurture the curiosity driven research, just as well as providing support to applied research,” he said.
Another challenge McMaster and universities in Canada are facing is the growth of the student population. The number of students in Ontario is projected to grow by 60,000 by the year 2020.
As the student experience is one of McMaster’s main strategic goals, these figures will have to be taken into account when planning over the next five years.
“We did remarkable work on the student experience, I think there’s a lot still to be done,” said Deane. “Things like the learning portfolio are I think gaining ground and becoming increasingly widely used.”
He also mentioned the Forward With Integrity fund, increases in community engagement, and the investment in the McMaster Institute for Innovation and Excellence in Teaching and Learning as contributors to an excellent student experience.
“We are at the centre of a national preoccupation or anxiety about our economic future, a national anxiety of our social future,” said Deane.
It seems as though McMaster is ready to face these challenges head on.
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In September, my final year as an undergraduate student starts. For the first time in a while, I don’t have to worry about which courses I need to take. Having conquered SOLAR in June for the last time, I don’t envy those still trying to get into courses, much less those trying to figure out what their major will be.
In today’s economy, it’s often easier to ask questions about which majors are ‘useful’ in terms of monetary investment—as opposed to why we really want to major in something, or anything, and why we came to university in the first place.
Media outlets have been reporting for some time that students are shifting away from the liberal arts and toward more ‘practical’ fields of study. Lists of “Most practical majors” and “Highest paying jobs” have been springing up vigorously. They’re hard to turn away from, given the dismal job market millennials are facing. The Washington Post reported that 70 per cent more American college grads worked minimum wage jobs in 2012 compared to ten years before. The Globe and Mail published an online interactive “time machine” showing that Canadian university grads of 2010 have it worse in terms of income, housing prices, tuition, and student loans, than grads had it 30 years ago.
After OUAC released confirmation statistics earlier this month, Maclean’s On Campus ran a short article on how students are opting for practical programs. (In Ontario, confirmed acceptances to university science programs are up 5.2 per cent from last year and down 1.6 per cent in the arts, although the fine and applied arts experienced an 8.7 per cent increase.)
But ‘practicality’ is too often being associated with ‘employability,’ though they don’t imply the same things. In the current job market, being able to apply skills you’ve learned doesn’t necessarily mean you will get a job. Students feel pressure to look employable on paper, and many struggle to gain experience that leads somewhere and pays a decent wage, too.
How career development can be improved and whether students are fully prepared for the workplace are concerns that most programs are grappling with. There’s nothing about the humanities, sciences or social sciences that makes one more objectively valuable, or “practical,” than another.
We should be speaking more directly to the economic reasons why universities and students are in a tough spot, instead of painting a bleak picture of academia being divided between ‘old-’ and ‘new-’ age programs. The reality is that post-secondary education as a system needs revamping.
That being said, university is not for everyone. It’s not fair to keep telling high-schoolers that they will fit the mould if they just try. (Note: OUAC’s statistics show a steady increase in confirmation of university acceptances, from 67,393 in 2004 to 91,378 this year.)
As student debt soars and issues like underfunding continue to be hotly debated, public institutions should avoid overstating the monetary returns for an undergraduate degree, and students shouldn’t underestimate the cost (financial and social) of getting one.
And if a student does choose one program over another, it should be because they are genuinely interested in going another route, not because they’ve been told not to take a risk on the ‘impractical.’
Vanaja Sivakumar
The Silhouette
Many McMaster students can recall feelings of frustration with respect to the teaching practices common at the University, and consequently have ideas to improve the situation.
These pursuits, often hindered by a lack of communication, paved the way to the McMaster Seminar on Higher Education, featuring a series of discussions about the issues plaguing higher education.
The overall aim is to encourage dialogue and inspire critical thought in McMaster University and the Hamilton community. It emphasizes the importance of academics and society as a whole, and how both can learn from one another.
The seminar aims to appeal to a range of audiences, encouraging attendance and expression from students, the direct recipients of educational change.
The February session of the five-part speaker series, hosted by the Office of the President, proved to be both informative and insightful. This seminar invited the President’s Teaching & Learning Award winners: Dr. Ann Herring, Dr. Sheila Sammon, Dr. Patty Solomon and Dr. Jean Wilson.
Discussion topics were centered on the development of successful community-engaged learning programs and projects at McMaster University. The panelists shared their experience and expertise in conceptualizing, developing, and implementing community engaged projects within their own teaching strategies and the feedback they received from their students.
The seminar commenced with the moderator, Sue Baptiste, professor in the School of Rehabilitation Science, prompting discussion among the panellists about their own teaching experiences. Baptiste began by asking panellists to share their opinions about the meaning of “community” and how it is linked to learning.
Dr. Herring shared her own experience as a professor of Anthropology, describing a project she assigned, which required her students to compile a book about Hamilton. She expressed that her students were happy to be engaged with the Hamilton community and not solely confined to the campus educational scene.
Other panelists answered the question by drawing on their personal experience such as Dr. Soloman, who shared his experience working with HIV patients and how learning from them, in terms of their social disabilities rather then the actual virology of the disease, was more beneficial to both the patient and the recipient learner.
Dr. Wilson, being a literary scholar, used her love of analyzing and discussing themes in famous novels as a venue for community engagement lessons which foster an ability to discover new, unique perspectives.
However, no matter what academic background each panelist came from, the overall theme of “learning from the environment around us” was prevalent.
Each panelist expressed the need to eschew the idea of “tokenism” as a way of connecting with the surrounding community.
The refined model of community engagement calls for “giving and receiving,” a form of knowledge that is the best form of community engagement.
Farzeen Foda
Senior News Editor
Universities have undergone a drastic shift in recent years, much of which, most would argue, has been positive. Due to systematic mobilization of resources toward research and innovation, a greater influx of discoveries have been observed – a trend to which McMaster can certainly attest.
There are, however, negative shifts that have persisted. One of them is the transition of funding sources for universities from public to private.
Christopher Newfield, professor of American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, explained at a McMaster Seminar on Higher Education on Nov. 21, that higher education is more frequently being seen “as a private right rather than a public good.”
The talk was hosted by the President’s Office and jointly funded by the Public Intellectuals Project.
Newfield spoke at length about the economic spiral that has led to the current state of universities, contending that the shift from public to private funding for post-secondary education has been sustained by the “American funding model cycle of decline,” which he referred to as the “Wheel of Death.”
Based on the model, the root of the increasing privatization of universities, in the United States specifically, stems from a reduction of state funding. In Canada, on the other hand, post-secondary education is largely regulated at the federal level.
Inferences made on the “Wheel of Death” suggest that reduced public funding is met by reluctance on the part of university faculty and administration to adapt to the change.
This stubbornness pushes the issue onto students, who are left with no choice but to comply with increasing tuition fees. In turn, the cycle ultimately facilitates the use of the student population as an “indispensable ATM machine” resulting in exponentially increasing levels of student debt. As noted by Newfield.
In discussing educational attainment, he noted that Canada fairs better in the proportion of individuals who complete their post-secondary degree or diploma, but those increasing numbers mean little when the substance of those credentials is consistently diminishing - a trend he has noticed in his own students who often reach the brink of graduation lacking basic skills and competencies. To rectify this, Newfield called for a simple process: “putting the content back into the credential.”
Astonishing to him as well was the increasing numbers of students who don’t quite know what they want out of their education.
To counter this, Newfield suggested a revitalized perspective to post-secondary education, focusing on essentials skills rather than instruction in the first and second year, leaving heavy instruction to the senior years of the university career. This would involve more student-professor interaction in the early years of university education.
These reasons compounded, argued Newfield, necessarily requires a shift in roles of universities and the ways in which they should be managed.
While Newfield discussed the state of the issue in the United States, a similar trend has unfolded in Canada as well.
Newfield noted the effects of the “Wheel of Death” are certainly reversible, but change will require strategic planning of educational goals, followed by seeing the funding for those goals.
While more graduates obtain decrees without substance, and funding for research constantly dwindles, whether or not this shift will occur remains to be seen.
