The Varsity

In any given year, according to the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation, between 40 and 55 per cent of students drop out of their post-secondary institution. Of course, those aren’t all dropouts: many of them simply transfer to another school or switch from university to college. How many? Don’t ask the government.

As the Canadian Council on Learning pointed out in their recent report Strategies for Success, Canada’s federal government collects little data on the post-secondary education system. That puts us behind other countries, says the CCL.

“We found that almost all other developed countries have built not only the national information systems required to optimize policy, but have also—in both unitary and federal states—provided themselves with some of the necessary national tools and mechanisms to adjust, to act and to succeed,” reads the report. “Canada has not.”

This needs to change, argues the report. It recommends a “national data strategy,” which begins with a single student number that would follow students between degrees and institutions, and across provincial borders. Reliable statistics could lead to benchmarks and goals. For Joey Coleman, a writer for Maclean’s education blogs, it’s about accountability.

“Nobody is collecting the data. We’re spending $36 billion a year, and there’s no goal, and no measurement of the outcome,” he said. “We have a system that is facing difficulty but we don’t know what that difficulty is.”

Strategies for Success also hints at integration in other areas, from a national e-learning strategy to better acceptance of transfer credits.

If that comes, it will be too late for Tammy Sprung, who transferred from Dalhousie University after her second year. The fourth-year history student has spent much of the last two years dealing with the fallout of her move. Many of Sprung’s transferred credits came with long lists of U of T courses she was excluded from taking, which complicated course selection and prerequisites later on. She was also forced to go back and take extra 100-level courses.

“I essentially chose my majors and minors based on what kind of deals I could cut with department heads when I transferred,” she said. If she had realized the battle ahead of her, Sprung said, “I don’t think I would have come to U of T.”