Prousky: Beyond international students: The other problem with Canada’s private education industry

Yet another crack in international and domestic students:

…It’s not that hard for Canadian high-school students to buy their seats in the country’s most coveted university programs. For a few thousand dollars, students can enroll at private credit-granting “schools” – usually in strip malls – where they’re almost guaranteed top marks. What these students pay in fees, they can often recoup in scholarship money.

…

The whole thing bears a striking resemblance to the issue of pay-for-citizenship private colleges. At some of these institutions, as many as 90 per cent of students are “no shows,” and in all likelihood are just paying the college for the visa and work permit it affords them. Morally, it’s no different than a domestic student who buys a grade they don’t deserve.

Clearly something beyond a cap on student visas needs to be done to restore the country’s meritocratic values. Shoddy private schools need to be held accountable, regardless of whether they target international or domestic, or high-school or college students.

The problem is, there doesn’t appear to be much data on these private schools, and any available data is wanting. At a minimum, provinces would need to know the acceptance, enrolment, graduation and employment rates at each of these schools. Ontario purports to make this data available, but it’s chock full of missing fields.

There are thousands of these private secondary schools across the country, but do the provinces know how many students attend them and on average how inflated their grades are? If they do, they aren’t sharing this information with universities, and despite auditing these private schools, rarely if ever shut them down.

Some universities have taken matters into their own hands. The University of Waterloo in Southwestern Ontario made headlines in 2018 for its “secret list” of high schools for which they adjust applicants’ grades. But if this effort is going to bring about meaningful change, it requires provincewide co-operation.

Jonah Prousky is a management consultant and freelance writer who focuses on business, technology and society.

Source: Beyond international students: The other problem with Canada’s private education industry