Value of university report card debated

Natalie Climenhaga, CUP Alberta and Northern Bureau Chi

EDMONTON (CUP) — The release of the Globe and Mail’s sixth annual university report card has reignited debate on the value of rankings and evaluations in the post-secondary world.

“I worry that these types of surveys [ . . . ] aren’t necessarily getting at a reliable measure of what students feel is important,” said Steven Dollansky, a vice-president with the University of Alberta students’ union.

The report compiled online survey responses from 43,000 undergraduate students attending 53 Canadian universities.

Simon Beck, the editor of the Globe and Mail University Report Card 2007, noted that since the survey was “self-selecting” the number of respondents per institution varied heavily.

“Obviously the bigger the university, the more likely the bigger the sample was,” Beck said, noting that separating the schools into four size groups has facilitated fairer comparison.

“We don’t think it’s fair to compare a large school with a very small school, because they have different challenges, and often different aims and goals,” Beck said. “You would only really want to be comparing the schools within each size grouping for a fair comparison.”

Nevertheless, Dollansky said that there are “numerous different surveys done by external groups that all value different things” and provide different results.

“Without clear justifiable methodology behind it, [reports ranking universities] can sometimes be misleading to prospective students,” he said.

Duncan Wojtaszek, the executive director of the Council of Alberta University Students (CAUS), added that prospective students decide which university to attend based on a variety of reasons.

“And often times, not all of those reasons are in-calculated in single report,” he said. “I’m not trying to downplay [the Globe and Mail University Report Card . . . but] it’s by no means the only criteria that a student will use when deciding what program to attend.”

University rankings published by Maclean’s magazine have faced continued opposition from post-secondary institutions who regard the methodology used to compile the rankings as flawed.

But Beck noted that the Globe and Mail’s rankings provide a different resource.

“We feel we do a complimentary job to Maclean’s. It’s not really a sort of directly comparable kind of process,” he said.

“From the standpoint of an undergraduate student, the Globe and Mail report is probably more useful than the MacLean’s report,” said University of Alberta provost and vice-president Carl Amrhein.

“However, the Globe and Mail report is also flawed in the sense that it takes anybody that signs on to that website.”

The Globe and Mail’s online survey asked students to respond to over 100 different aspects of campus life ranging from the quality of food, class size, technological resources, and athletics.

According to Amhrein it cannot be assumed that students from different universities will evaluate things in the same way.

“An undergraduate student knows only [his or her] own situation in that single university,” he said.

However, Amrhein added that despite its potential flaws, he still pays attention to the Globe and Mail survey “because it does contain, even in a sort of rough form, information that we find useful.”

Even if it’s only the students who get onto that website and respond, that’s still a student’s summary judgment that I should pay attention to,” he said.

Both Dollansky and Amrhein named the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) as a resource with tight statistical quality control they refer to often.

Beck emphasized that over the six years of the report he thinks the overall attention that universities pay to the quality of student life has been increasing.

“We really think that [the report card has] had a good impact in that the universities take it seriously now and do listen to what their students say,” Beck concluded.