Jordan: I don’t know if you remember the feeling of graduating, of stepping out of high school and into the world of possibilities opening up in front of you, of making big decisions. While for hundreds of thousands of Canadian students this is quite a summer to be stepping out into the world and it’s about to be quite a time for making those big decisions. Right now, universities and colleges across the country are making plans for the fall. They’re making plans with an abundance of caution and they’re doing it while acknowledging that they really have no idea what the fall will bring.
So they’re being careful and they’re shifting as much of what they offer students as they can online. But depending on the program, that might not be that much. So would be students have a choice to make, just like they always have. They can start their postsecondary education right away, mostly online, and get working on their degree, or they can take a year off and get a decent job and make some mo… probably can’t do that actually. Or if they’re really lucky, they can take a gap year and go out and travel the… probably not going to do that either. So what are schools and students doing to prepare for an unprecedented fall? How different will planned online courses be from the hastily thrown together zoom lecture that we saw this spring. What happens to the hundreds of things about a postsecondary education that can’t be replaced virtually? And what options do students who are currently enrolled have if they think that what their schools are offering is a poor replacement for what they signed up for?
I’m Jordan Heath Rawlings, and this is The Big Story. Joe Friesen is the postsecondary education reporter with The Globe and Mail. Hi Joe.
Joe: Hi Jordan. How are you?
Jordan: I’m doing pretty well, and I hope you’re getting on okay.
Joe: Yeah, things are good. Thank you.
Jordan: Why don’t we take a step back from the pandemic stuff that we’re going to talk about and you can kind of set up, in a normal universe, on a normal timeline, what would colleges and universities and students be doing right now? Where would we be in the process of getting ready for the fall term?
Joe: Well, colleges and universities right now would be in a couple of different modes. On the one hand, they would be getting ready to celebrate convocation. Students would be graduating in the spring, and this is one of those momentous occasions that has sort of been postponed by the pandemic, and they would also be starting to turn their minds toward the fall. So getting courses ready, trying to get a sense of what their enrollment will be for the fall, what the mix of domestic and international students ought to be, and what kind of course offerings they want to have for the year.
But of course, things are looking very different right now. And so college campuses at the moment are pretty quiet.
Jordan: What are they doing to sort of ramp up preparations for the fall? Also to try to give their graduating students some kind of that momentous occasion, are they doing anything about that?
Joe: Well on the convocation front, many universities said about a month ago that they planned not to have convocation this year. And that was very upsetting for a lot of people who have worked hard for a long time to get to this moment. Something that they wanted to share with their friends and family.
And so as a result, there’s been a movement to create these kinds of online convocation ceremonies. You might’ve seen some videos. I think it was a Japanese university that had robots walking across the stage with a kind of iPad image of a student where the face would be and the robot would receive a degree.
I don’t know if any Canadian schools are going that far. But there’s going to be some kind of online ceremony in a lot of places. I think people are going out on their porches and in gowns and caps to have a little celebration with balloons and signs and that sort of thing. People are doing their best to make something special of it. Because it is a pretty great accomplishment for all those who get through it. And it’s something that deserves to be celebrated. But the circumstances this year are just so different. I don’t think anyone anticipated it would be like this. So in some cases there were some upset about the absence of a ceremony and petitions were started, for example, to make sure that something will happen.
And I think when we return to something closer to normal, a lot of schools have said there will be something in person. But you know, that could be late in the fall. It could be into 2021. It could be even later than that. We just don’t know yet.
Jordan: And in the meantime, do we have any idea what the fall will look like in universities? What are those plans looking like?
Joe: It is really different across the country, but for the most part, schools are saying that they expect to do online delivery for the most part. With the opportunity to have some smaller in person face to face settings. And when I say it’s different across the country, of course, it’s the local health authorities who play a big role in deciding what is possible for public institutions.
So in places like New Brunswick or Manitoba, or even BC now, where they’ve been really successful in getting the curve flattened and getting almost no new cases. It may be that there will be some in person, in class instruction. It won’t be the same as before. I don’t think you can have a crowded lecture theatre, but you could have students sitting a meter apart in a lecture theatre.
And so a room that used to see 150, if you plan for it to seat only 50, that might be a potential viable classroom. Similarly, labs with a few people might be able to be run. There are some American schools where the climate is a little better that have said that they plan to hold classes outside, which we’ve heard is one of the safer ways of getting together with people, but you know, with enough distance so that the virus could dissipate in the air.
So there’s a wide range of possibilities. But the big thing that we’re hearing is that it will still be primarily online in the fall for most students in most places. And that has caused a lot of uncertainty about what the school year might look like.
Jordan: When you talk to people who are making these plans and trying to build a picture of what the year looks like, how do they wrestle with the fact that they’ve got to plan for something right now that begins in September and students are making decisions right now about September, and at this point, unless I’m wrong, we don’t have a great idea of what three weeks or four weeks out looks like?
Joe: No, exactly. And that makes it really tough. And people expect firm answers now because these are life changing decisions. Which university will I go to? Will I move to that city? And nobody can tell you what three or four weeks from now will look like as you point out. So I don’t know how they make those decisions, but the great thing about universities for the most part is they are the places where the experts who we are turning to reside. That’s where you’ll find the top scientists, the doctors, the administrators, the people who have worked in public health, who have some experience of this kind of planning.
They are for the most part, to be found in universities. So the university administrations have a great resource at their fingertips and that they can call on. At the university of Toronto, they have Vivek Goel. At other universities, they have similar levels of experience, who can guide them as they try to make these decisions.
But it’s certainly not easy, and big institutions, for the most part, they’re going to probably err on the side of safety and caution. They have a responsibility to do the safe thing first. But everyone will be thinking about, first and foremost is how do you keep students and the general population safe if and when we get back to something closer to normal.
Jordan: Is there any kind of structured deadline to any of this? I mean, there are students, I presume right now trying to make that decision if it’s still worth the tuition money to go, if it’s going to be mostly online, and do we know if they’ll have a firm idea of what their fall will look like before they have to make that final call?
Joe: I think they will have a better idea. Some universities just in the last week or so have made their intentions clear. McGill, for example, I spoke to the president there, a week ago and she said, we thought it was only fair to tell students how we expect the fall to look. And that in, in McGill’s case, they said it will be primarily online. UBC said something similar. Concordia and I think University of Ottawa, and now more and more universities are coming out with their statements that for the most part, walk the line of saying primarily online with a hybrid mix of in-person where possible. Early June I think is probably the time to look at as being a fair moment for universities to start making clear what they think the fall will be. That gives students and their parents at least a month or two to before they have to make these big decisions.
So I think by mid June probably, things will be clearer, but it’s starting to get clear now that I think the fall will online primarily with maybe some local variations in places where the virus has been well contained and smaller in-person hands-on opportunities where the situation is safe enough to go ahead with something like that.
Jordan: I want to ask you a little bit about what those online classes will be like. Cause when this began back in, I think it was late March or early April, we spoke to both a professor and a student who were engaged in distance learning and they both spoke about a number of challenges just in terms of different professors using different software or not being able to connect with students and offer meaningful feedback, the pass fail system and all that kind of stuff that was slapped together really hastily at the time. Do we have a sense of whether or not this will be different from that? If there’s protocols and grading in place?
Joe: I think the universities are hoping it will be different. You know what happened in March was basically an emergency scenario where they hadn’t planned for something like this to happen. And so people who make these distinctions will say, we didn’t really have online learning in March, but we had was an emergency transition to online delivery of primarily offline courses. Now, with a few more months to prepare, I think it will be better organized. I think you will see maybe less of the big variations in the level of quality of the courses because universities do have resources to help professors make these courses better in an online format. However, the scale of this is still so huge. I don’t know that every course will be able to get the benefit of of a fully online educational treatment. It takes quite a bit of time and money and resources to make something really great in an online environment.
And even though there are four months now, I don’t know that everything will be working perfectly the way that the professors would hope. I think there’ll still be a little bit of that scramble going on, some learning as people figure out what works well and what doesn’t work so well.
And some students will have to kind of work through those adaptations, but I suspect it will be better organized than it was in March, just out of the sheer fact that it’s not an emergency situation the way it was then. So I think universities are hoping that they will have learned some lessons and will be able to provide a high quality education.
Jordan: I think when a lot of us picture online classes, we think of a professor maybe recording or even doing a live video lecture and taking questions and handing out assignments, but what’s going to happen with the programs that rely on people being hands on? I’m thinking here of cooking our agriculture or fashion or even journalism school. I mean a lot of the people that come through the programs now and come to our studio learned in studios provided by the journalism school and there’s no way you can recreate that set up at home without spending a ton of money.
Joe: Yeah, and that’s a tough question, and I don’t really know what the answer is. I think institutions will do their best to keep as many programs as possible up and running, but there may be cases where they have to say, we can’t do this properly right now, and so we have to take a break. I know at the university of Saskatchewan, there is some of their life science programs and veterinary programs and health science programs that they just weren’t going to be able to run in this spring term given the distancing rules. And so they said, those students just won’t be taking those classes right now. They won’t want situations like that to last very long.
And so I suspect they will be trying to tackle those questions right now. How to do it. And there are always people who will say, it’s possible, you just have to think of a way. I don’t know. And for the students in those programs, I worry that the quality and the level of education that they’re going to get won’t be the same and won’t be as good.
Particularly if you’re going into a program like that, or even coming back to it as a returning student, there’s some tough decisions to be made there about whether the kind of education you’re going to get is what you want and deserve, or whether you should take a break for a year or two and and wait and see what happens.
Jordan: Are there any options for students to do that, to either defer acceptance for a year, take a pause in the middle of their program, or are there any full or partial refunds available for students who have already paid for a fuller part of the semester?
Joe: There were some campaigns launched by students to try to get some kind of a refund in the winter term as it ended during the opening stage of this pandemic.
And I think universities have said they they’re not typically going to refund tuition in the middle of a semester. Certainly on a large scale basis, they’re probably listening to individuals on a case by case, if they were unable to complete their studies for any number of mitigating reasons.
I think they were happy to refund people who were living in residence, for example. Some universities have refunded fees in some areas because you couldn’t go to the gym the way you used to. You weren’t taking advantage of some student services the way you used to. So there’s no sense charging for those, certainly it doesn’t seem fair. But for students who want to defer for a year, if they’re looking at going back in September, that certainly is a viable option for them. If they wanted to take a gap year. I’ve had many people getting in touch with me asking about what their options might be for a gap year. A lot of people are talking about that and you know, for their part, university administrators are saying the enrolment may be down a little bit this year as people are unsure about what online education might be like. It’s something on people’s minds.
Jordan: What do we know about what’s being done to either cancel, presumably in some places or recreate, in other places, the other elements of campus life? I know in America they’re already kind of talking about, ‘well, maybe we can have a college football season’, but even beyond sports, the student union or student newspapers or other kinds of campus groups. Is that moving to online or is that just kind of not going to happen?
Joe: I don’t know. When you think of university, those experiences that you get from things like working at the student newspaper or meeting other students in clubs, or just the day to day socialization and studying together that would happen at the library. That was almost the most important part of going to university. The friendships you made, the big events like sports. I can understand in the United States there’s huge pressure because the money is so big, to get those open again. But in Canada, it’s a little different. So I don’t know whether those sports seasons will go ahead in the fall.
Some universities I’ve talked with have said, ‘Oh, we will definitely maintain student clubs online, it’s possible to get together in a zoom chat and your shared interest in cycling could be a great way to get together with new friends’. I’m not university age myself anymore, much as I might wish to be. I don’t see that working out as well. I just think that that is one thing that will not be the same and it won’t be as beneficial. The way that live face to face interaction on campuses has always been. So I think that may be something that is disappointing for people who are really craving that university experience. But these are the times we’re living in right now. So I don’t know how much of it can be salvaged.
Jordan: Given all of that and all the changes you’ve just talked about. Do we know yet if we’re seeing a ton of students more than anecdotally, but actually decide to take that gap year or to walk away? Do we have any sense of what’s going on with enrolment? I know the deadline’s not approaching just yet, but do we have early numbers?
Joe: We don’t know yet because the acceptances or the confirmations of acceptance will start coming in June. So again there’ll be a couple of weeks before we get a better sense of what the picture is like, but we know a few things. Interestingly enough, enrolment is up at many universities for the spring and summer terms, which caught some people by surprise. But on the other hand, maybe it makes perfect sense because it’s a terrible job market for many students. They have the benefit of the wage subsidy or the CERB. So they’re able to stay at home.
They can advance their degree and get paid while doing it. And so I think the students who are already in seem to be keen to get more education, and you may see that in the fall. You may see that people who were working part time and taking two courses, might now prefer to take three or four courses because of the job that they had has disappeared thanks to the Corona virus. The big area that is a real concern is international students, because the Canadian post-secondary system has come to rely on international students to a very, very significant extent for finances and for student numbers. It’s been estimated that that industry alone is worth about $23 billion in Canada.
Not entirely in postsecondary, but for the most part. And so for those students there’s several barriers that they would have to get over to get back to Canada. I mean, one, there were travel bans in place. Airlines aren’t flying. But the most significant I think, is that their paperwork, has been stalled either because the, the standardized tests that they need to take are not being offered in their home countries. So you need to prove a certain level of English proficiency, for example. Or it may be that the universities that they have attended before are closed, and so they can’t get transcripts to the Canadian universities to prove their, their bona fides and the Canadian immigration offices abroad, I don’t know that they’re operating at full capacity. So I don’t know how many of these applications they’re able to even get through at the moment and whether they could interview people face to face. I don’t think probably we’re doing that. So there’s a huge number of barriers to getting new students to Canada.
So that’s going to be an enrolment shock and a revenue shock. And it may be that students coming out of Canadian high schools will look at this and say, I have so looked forward to this university experience that I’ve dreamed about, that I’ve seen on TV that my parents had told me about. And I don’t know that I want to start in a pandemic.
We don’t know how big that number will be, but I’ve heard some universities estimating for a five to 10% drop. Obviously there’s still a lot to be gained from education and at a time when you can’t really travel and you can’t work. For many people, that’ll be the case.
Education is a pretty good bet. I would expect to see some weakness in the enrolment numbers this year. I think that would make sense.
Jordan: Well, you kind of touched on it a bit, and we’ve approached this mostly from the student perspective, which I think is the most important. But speaking of revenue shock, lastly I want to ask you about the impact on the schools themselves. How bad could that revenue shock be? We can speak of them as a business, we’ve seen hundreds and hundreds of businesses close up shop. Do we know that all the colleges and universities in Canada will survive this? How precarious are some of them?
Joe: I don’t think that we do know that they will all survive. I think this is the kind of thing that that could be a significant enough that a few don’t make it through. Now you have the huge research institutions, I imagine they will all be fine. They are absolutely essential not just to the economy of today, but the economy of tomorrow. We have so much invested in them. Even in the places where they have very high international student numbers, I think they will find a way to get through this. It’s probably at the level of the smaller school. Or in some cases, the colleges, where they have really gone in heavily for international students to drive a lot of their budget, that the risks are greatest.
Now, I think it’s important to make clear that there was a political decision here in the Canadian post-secondary system a long time ago, that that puts us in this position, which is that the transfers to institutions have mostly stayed flat for 10 or 20 years in many cases. And so the international student population has grown as universities have looked for ways to generate more revenue.
The smaller schools where they have upwards of 20 or 30% of their student body coming from overseas and paying tuition fees that are two or three or four times higher than the Canadian fees, those are the ones that will have the most to lose right now, or certainly are at the greatest risk.
One university, Laurentian in Sudbury, has already said that it is concerned about the financial impacts of COVID 19. I think many others are also very concerned. You look at some of those schools in the Maritimes, for example, I think St Mary’s has about 30% of its students that are international.
Cape Breton University has about two thirds of of its students coming from overseas. I would think the impacts there will be more significant. Now, the hope is, it’s just short term. We can go back to normal and have a normal entry for students in January and that initial shock can be bridged in a matter of months. But we don’t know how long this will last. So the longer it goes on, the harder it will get for some of the institutions. I’ve heard talk of trying to mobilize ways to get some of those international students to Canada more quickly, but I don’t know if any of them will come to fruition.
Jordan: I guess we’ll see. Thank you so much, Joe, for walking us through this.
Joe: Thanks very much for having me.
Jordan: Joe Friesen, postsecondary education reporter at The Globe and Mail. That was The Big Story. If you would like more, head to thebigstorypodcast.ca, you’ll find a ton of them. You can also find us on Twitter @thebigstoryfpm. You can email us too, the address is thebigstorypodcast@rci.rogers.com. We’re also in all of your podcast players. You pick your favourite one, you look us up and you find us. You listen, you rate and you review. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.
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