Students grapple with changes to higher education
Paying the same fees, they face closed schools, dodgy online learning, and no campus life
Classrooms in communities. Communities in classrooms.
The motto of the downtown Vancouver campus of Simon Fraser University — a promise to bring education directly to the people — blazes across the giant street-corner window of its library. But in these days of pandemic, the aspiration reads like an artifact of the past.
The once-welcoming doors to higher education are literally locked at SFU’s towering Harbour Centre, elegant Wosk Centre for Dialogue and stately Beedie school of business. A number of small private English-language colleges in the same downtown vicinity look even bleaker.
Strict COVID-19 warning signs pockmark almost every educational window in this downtown zone. Campus entryways are grey and grimy. Some language-college windows are smashed and barred. There are more security guards than anyone else.
This once-hot urban neighbourhood of public and private post-secondary institutions, centred around Hastings and Richards, serves as a harsh reminder that higher education is embattled by the COVID-19 crisis.
The vast majority of learning and teaching that remains is now online and will continue that way this fall and possibly beyond — the opposite of in-person, hands-on and community-rooted, which has been the pedagogical ideal.
It’s almost impossible to find a student in this dense downtown educational zone, which once teemed with thousands of young people from across Canada and around the world who packed the coffee shops, low-cost eateries and sometimes the cannabis dispensaries.
After Postmedia approached enough strangers to find an actual student, an engaging 23-year-old who identified himself as Chintan from India said he wished SFU would again open its doors to more classes, seminars, faculty meetings and labs.
“Right now, it’s not a very good experience. We’re not allowed to teach or learn in person,” said Chintan, who aims to finish his master’s program at SFU by the end of the year and then apply for Canada’s coveted three-year visa, called the postgraduate work permit.
“They should open up the campuses. I don’t think it does any harm,” Chintan said. “And they’re not lowering fees. I think they should.”
Higher education in the West has increasingly relied on two things that public-health officials basically forbid because of the coronavirus: people gathering in large groups and laissez-faire international travel.
Administrators have responded by moving online the vast majority of classes, even most of those enrolling fewer than 50, offering them to young people peppered in all corners of the world through Zoom, teleconferencing and streaming. Instructors are scrambling to handle the technology, with mixed success. And despite the elevated risk for cheating, students are writing machine-accessible exams from their bedrooms.
While tens of thousands of Canadian students have already returned to attending K-12 classes in school buildings, and restaurants, hotels and other venues are opening, at least in part, higher education is among those remaining most restrictive and, pardon the pun, remote.
Faculty across North America are under once-unheard-of pressure to provide online lectures, tutorials and sometimes even tests in an “asynchronous” manner — which means not in real time, or out of sync.
A key reason administrators are calling on faculty to move away from real-time education is that daylight hours in B.C. are much different than daylight hours in India, China, France, Brazil or Halifax, where tens of thousands of students are trying to complete their programs. They don’t want real-time lectures and interactive workshops in the middle of their night.
With airports virtually closed to most non-Canadian travellers, both the federal Liberal government and post-secondary administrators are pulling out the stops to find ways to hold on to as many as they can of the 642,000 foreign students the country hosted at the end of 2019, half of whom attended private colleges.
Lachlan Williams, a University of B.C. engineering student, is one of Canada’s more than two-million post-secondary students who are not amused at how education is being attenuated.
He says the decision to go ahead with long-distance education — while forbidding not only all large classes this fall, but most labs, tutorials and group projects in the name of safety — seems mostly like an attempt to “take advantage of a bad situation.”
With most institutions of higher learning feeling like abandoned towns, Caitlin Barker, who is not returning in person in September to Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., says it’s a “bummer” to be forced to do much of her four-year undergraduate program from afar.
The third-year political science student will instead stay in her parents’ Vancouver house and take her courses online, at least until Christmas, even while she and her fellow students have already grown tired of the way some professors fumble to put together online PowerPoint presentations.
Mostly Barker misses the full-blooded Queen’s campus scene, with its pubs, coffee shops and friendships.
She had been almost thrilled by the sense of personal autonomy, vibrant peer discussions and collective motivation that went with making a go of it in the world on her own.
Now, Barker will be confined to computer-screen learning in the family home. While it might work for some, she says, “I zone out a lot. I can’t watch a screen for a long time without going into my own world.”
STUDENTS TRY TO REDEEM A SHRINKING EXPERIENCE
These students’ worries echo at a large scale. A Canadian Association of Universities Teachers survey found one of three domestic students intend to take a break from school because of COVID-19 lockdowns. Half say it’s devastated their finances. And three in four worry the response to the coronavirus has “created a poor learning environment.”
Smaller colleges and universities appear most threatened.
Robert Zemsky, who co-wrote a book about woes in higher education, predicts the pandemic will contribute to 20 per cent of North America’s post-secondary institutions, especially the private ones, being forced to close.
Even though fallout is severe in Canada, COVID-19 tensions appear even more elevated in the litigious U.S., where more than 130 class-action lawsuits have been filed against post-secondary institutions, demanding compensation for “substandard educations.”
Despite the diminishment, few signs exist that colleges or universities are lowering their fees. Indeed, many Canadian institutions are slightly raising fees for domestic and international students. Since no college or university wants to be seen as one of the less popular ones, they are also tending to play it coy about how many applications they’re getting.
SFU and the University of B.C. are going ahead with scheduled fee increases for 2020-21 of roughly two per cent for domestic students and four per cent for international students. North Vancouver’s Capilano University said it’s keeping fees the same as last year.
Neither of B.C.’s two biggest universities has laid off faculty or staff due to COVID-19. UBC and SFU also maintain that, even though it’s too early to be definitive about enrolment levels, applications for the fall are consistent with previous years. Capilano University did not provide data on either staffing or enrolment.
Meanwhile, Canadian administrators and faculty are clambering to redeem what they can of students’ ruptured encounter with higher education.
SFU provost Jon Driver maintains the decision to stay largely with online instruction in the fall “creates certainty for students and instructors, safety for those with higher levels of health risks, and access to learning for students who cannot travel to B.C. at this time.”
Provosts from seven public B.C. universities, including Driver, joined forces this month to publish an “open letter” promising would-be foreign and domestic students that, even in these uncertain times, the educational experience will be rich. Possibly some selected small classes will be in person.
The provosts maintain largely remote education will provide “opportunities to explore different forms of communication, to engage with classmates and instructors in new and interesting ways, to build bridges to other cultures, and to experience the opportunities that technology can provide in connecting people, issues, and ideas.”
INTERNATIONAL-STUDENT POLICY’S IMPACT
Williams, the UBC engineering student, however, is not alone in worrying that post-secondary institutions are forging ahead with online learning because they can still generate revenue while their physical doors, to a great extent, are closed.
“Perhaps this decision was made to level the playing field for all students, domestic and international alike,” Williams wrote in a comment piece in The Vancouver Sun.
It is so unfair we take their money and we don’t offer them enough.”
Jessie Smith
“But why should domestic students’ educations suffer because international students took the risk that comes with studying abroad? In-person learning should be available for those students able to return. Students surely would accept … physical distancing and streaming of large lectures.”
The turmoil is forcing educators and students to do a great deal of complicated adjusting, innovating and jockeying — all adding up to a virtual revolution in higher education, at least for the near future.
The federal Liberals are doing everything they can to limit the damage, by keeping international-student money flowing. Cabinet ministers often boast foreign students bring $22 billion annually into the economy, with at least $6 billion in fees going directly to public and private educational institutions.
Foreign students account for one in four new university undergraduates in the country, says Statistics Canada. Administrators suggest foreign-student fees, which are typically four times those paid by domestic students, are a key reason they don’t have to raise more money from locals.
Since foreign students typically contribute as much or more than local students to many institutions’ coffers, it’s not a surprise many believe the decision to stick predominantly to online learning is in part to avoid alienating those on study visas.
Shinder Purewal, a Kwantlen Polytechnic University political scientist, says his school “relies so much on international students that it would collapse as an institution without their money.”
It’s no wonder, Purewal said, “the KPU administration only thinks about the convenience of international students at the expense of domestic students, faculty and academic integrity.”
As at KPU, administrators across the country are striving to make sure visa students who remain in India, China, France, Brazil, Vietnam, the U.S. and elsewhere will end up getting basically the same experience as domestic students.
KPU originally ordered all fall courses to go online in an asynchronous manner, said Purewal, explaining that such non-real-time educating requires “recording audiovideo lectures and then having them posted on a website accessible to students any time of the day or week.”
Kwantlen’s administrators, Purewal said, have even urged holding exams in non-real time, because “students registered in India are up at night by Canadian time, since Indian time is 12 hours ahead of Pacific standard time.” But, after pushback from Kwantlen’s faculty association, Purewal said the administration agreed to a process whereby all students would have to write exams on the same day at the same time. The potential for cheating, among other things, was high.
Australia is going a different route. In the midst of the pandemic, politicians in Australia, which along with Canada has the highest proportion of foreign students per capita in the world, told foreign students to return to their homelands unless they could support themselves.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, in contrast, is vigorously wooing young people who are ready to pay $20,000 to $25,000 a year for the dream of studying in an English-language country.
Aware that Canadian studyvisa applications have fallen by almost one-third since COVID-19 hit in March, Ottawa recently removed the cap on how many hours most foreign students can work while studying. The federal Liberals, in addition, changed policy so that up to a million foreign students, refugees and guest workers already in Canada
could apply for the Canada Emergency Response Benefit of $2,000 a month without providing proof of a work permit.
In late May, the Liberals also announced foreign students are permitted to complete 50 per cent of their overall studies outside Canada. Perhaps most importantly, Ottawa said such students will still be able to get a postgraduate work permit for up to three years.
Ottawa has many reasons to make such unprecedented welcoming gestures, judging by a survey by Shiksa, a major educational organization in India, whose inhabitants make up one-third of Canada’s foreign-student contingent. Shiksa found one in two Indians hoping to study abroad intended to defer their plans to travel to Canada.
‘WE’RE DOING THE BEST WE CAN’
Jessie Smith, a veteran Langara College humanities instructor, can understand the frustration of students from India, who last year made up more than half of her institution’s international cohort of 6,500.
Recognizing international students have been wooed in increasingly large numbers to make up for provincial governments’ reduced funding, Smith joins many global specialists in saying the pandemic is proving how highrisk a gamble that has been. While some foreign students flourish, Smith said, others get hurt.
“Too often there is a huge chasm between the skills the international students have when they arrive and the skills they need to succeed in post-secondary,” said Smith.
“It is so unfair we take their money and we don’t offer them enough. It’s a pedagogical nightmare to have students who can barely write a sentence, let alone write an essay, in the same class with students who deserve the rigours of a college education, but who suffer because faculty have to spend so much time with struggling students.”
This year’s COVID-19 restrictions, Smith says, with their heavy emphasis on remote learning and high technology, have accelerated existing difficulties for all students.
Kieran Konst, a University of Northern B.C. student, is among those skeptical about the assurances he can get a great education during the pandemic.
“Many professors are uncomfortable with or untrained on using online systems and in some cases are unwilling to use them. In the most severe cases, they may even have difficulty using basic email,” Konst says.
“I have had classes with instructors who were uncomfortable with PowerPoint. And now they are being asked to teach via video conference? The reality is that educational institutions are going to have to find ways to ensure that the online value matches the price tag.”
One of the many thorny issues around mass online education relates to the heightened potential for cheating.
When Caitlin Barker had to do her final exam this spring after returning to Vancouver from Queen’s University, she, like countless others, had to endure the weird experience of having a security officer watch her by web camera for three hours while she sat in her bedroom completing the test.
Langara’s Smith understands the often-surreal nature of higher education during this pandemic. She knows domestic and foreign students, often under pressure to work to survive and frequently lacking technological resources, need faculty and staff to be more up to speed on everything that goes into making online learning valuable.
UBC, SFU and most institutions, along with provincial governments, say they’re trying to offer extra aid to students in regard to financing, counselling and support. Will it be enough?
COVID-19 has brought a sea change to academia, shrinking the sphere fiscally and especially experientially.
It’s made higher education’s continuing struggle for viability, relevance and affordability more acute than ever.
As Smith says of her Langara colleagues: “We’re doing the best we can. But it’s so painful to think about offering a course that is not up to our high standards.”