What’s wrong with universities? Don’t get Jeff Rybak started.
Too many students are being sold on university in high school, convinced it is something they must do, explained the UTSC graduate, who has just written a book on the topic. And many students enter university with incredible expectations before they are ready for the experience.
“The university is pulled in a lot of directions, trying to be everything to everyone-that’s what’s wrong with university,” Rybak said.
“By trying to be a universal product you get students here who don’t know why they’re here.”
What started as a lengthy academic guide Rybak wrote during his tenure as VP academics at SCSU has grown into a full-fledged 290-page look into Canadian universities that is part how-to guide, part self-improvement book, and part policy document. Rybak’s book, What’s Wrong With University?, will be launched today at UTSC.
As Rybak tells it, students would knock on his office door with complaints and demands. “‘I want an easy course, what should I take?,'” he recalled them asking. “So I’d ask ‘What are you passionate about?'”
Pretty soon, it became obvious to Rybak that the student had no idea how to answer the question.
“Aaagh!” Rybak cringed, his brow furrowing with frustration. “Students aren’t even trained to ask the right questions.”
Rybak, 31, came to university as a mature student at age 27, eight years after graduating from Woodlands High School in Mississauga. “I was a very undermotivated high school student,” he said.
Rybak spent the intervening time traveling through Europe, “the typical bumming around and learning stuff thing,” while unsuccessfully attempting to pitch fiction to publishers. But in the summer of 2001, he decided to return to school.
“I was in Madrid playing Frisbee at Plaza D’Espana,” he related. “I was talking about the story I wanted to write about university and I realized I didn’t know the most basic things about university.”
Rybak came back to school in Sept. 2002, majoring in English. He became involved in student politics at SCSU, where he held the VP academics portfolio for two years, from 2003 to 2005. During that time he wrote an academic primer to help answer the most common queries students approached him with. “I wasn’t trying to write this huge sweeping thing,” he said.
The primer caught the eye of Russell Brown, the supervisor of the English program at UTSC, who passed it on to a publisher contact. Rybak was asked to expand the primer into a book.
Rybak’s book devotes considerable attention to grading-one of the biggest gripes among students. Having dealt with academic matters at SCSU, Rybak has also gotten a glimpse of the grading process from the instructor’s point of view. He described instructor course manuals, which detail, in very frank language, marking rules for profs to follow so as not to raise their students’ ire, while still maintaining the institution’s grading standards.
UTSC’s grading guidelines, for example, mandate that no more than 20 per cent of all marks should be A’s.
“It’s not the university trying to smack it to students,” he said. “It’s the university trying to come up with a universal norm. The grade curve is just inherently there.”
Rybak’s book is also partly self-help. He sheds light on the inner workings of the university system, from the outsider experience of a mature student. Throughout it, he encourages students to discover for themselves why they decided to attend university, presenting what he considers the five archetypes of university students.”
“They’re not exclusive types-students don’t have to just be one or the other,” he said.
In a particularly bold chapter, Rybak suggests various reforms to the post-secondary system. For one, he would like to see one or two years of mandatory civil service for all high school graduates. More radically, he proposes that the private sector be encouraged to sponsor vocational training, as a way of getting industry to bear a greater share of post-secondary education’s costs.
But Rybak’s real target is the graduating high schooler.
“The book is for the student who’s going to come to school in September,” in the hope that it will lead them to question their motives for attending university.
“I feel that they’re not even encouraged to pursue these questions.”
