HESA: Merit Wars

.To watch:

..…The question is: how is the Ford Government going to approach all of this?

As near as I can tell, it has four options.

It can take stock of the full variety of pathways and adjudication of merit and say “eh, this is all too complicated/post-secondary institutes are doing a decent job”. It should go without saying that this is almost certainly the least likely outcome.

It can leave contextualized admissions alone but try to limit the practice of special pathways for Indigenous, racialized or otherwise underserved students. That is, it might give a pass to programs where 10-20% of places are reserved for certain underserved groups, but at the same time say “75% in reserved pathways (as TMU proposes) is too much”. I suspect this is the likeliest option.

It can leave contextualized admissions alone but eliminate pathways entirely. This would mean eliminating things like the U of T’s Indigenous Student Application Program and many other programs like it. My read of Conservatives’ views on this is that they tend to be warier of Indigeneity initiatives than they are of critiquing EDI as a whole, seeing more justice in the claims advanced by Indigenous communities than they do for Black ones (for instance). I think this is less likely than option 2 but would not rule it out.

It could seek to eliminate both pathways and contextualized admissions and tell institutions that the only thing they should use is high school grades.  

That last one might sound radical, but pay attention to what the Ford government has been doing in secondary schools, and in particular the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), which runs a large number of schools which were formerly selective (e.g. Schools of the Arts, Special STEM focus schools, International Baccalaureates, etc.). The selectivity process, naturally, was criticized because marks are often correlated with family income, and so 3 years ago, at the peak of the EDI wave, the TDSB decided to abandon selections and make all these schools lottery-based, which in theory at least would make access to these programs more equitable.

I have no idea whether this policy met its goal or not; to my knowledge there has not been a publicly released study on this. But it caused a number of people to freak out. Accusations of penalizing students who worked hard, of “devaluing merit” began to circulate. And there was some force to those arguments, particularly (IMHO) for elite Fine Arts programs where students no longer had to submit portfolios as evidence of talent/interest, which I think is a bit odd. I have never seen any surveys about this issue, but my guess is that it rankled particularly hard among parents in the entitled upper-middle class and aspirational Chinese families, since these are the groups that tend to do best in a “marks-only” system (for more on how Chinese parents view contextual ideas of merit, do listen to my podcast interview with Ruixue Jia, co-author of The Highest Exam from last fall).

And so, Ford government to the rescue! The government instructed the TDSB to ditch the policy, to loud applause from Trustee Weidong Pei, who gained office campaigning against lotteries. Replacing the lottery system? Well, according to the TDSB “Applicants will be seated based on their overall applicant score; a combination of select report card marks connected to their program of choice and an evaluated demonstration of knowledge and skills”, which sounds a lot like the previous marks-only based system, with all the class-and culture-based biases that brings. 

In other words, if the TDSB’s experience is anything to go by, the Ford government will go straight to option 4. And if that happens, it will be a seriously contentious affair since almost certainly it will mean a big reduction in students from underserved groups getting into high-demand programs. 

Now, none of this is going to happen in this admissions cycle (at least I bloody hope not). The likeliest scenario is that the government makes a move in the spring or summer, in order to put new rules in place – whatever those rules end up being – in place for the fall 2027 admissions cycle. So, we have a few months left before the wars start. But when they start, it won’t be pretty.

Source: Merit Wars