1. Mission, Mandate and work plan Ken Norrie Vice-President, Research NATVAC University of Guelph October 11, 2007 1

2.  HEQCO is an independent agency with a mandate to conduct research and offer policy advice on all aspects of post-secondary education in Ontario  Review and Research Plan 2007 released in July, 2007 (available at www.heqco.ca)www.heqco.ca  Priority research areas ◦ Accessibility ◦ Learning quality ◦ Accountability ◦ System design 2

3.  Council, chaired by Frank Iacobucci  President and CEO – Jim Downey  Research team ◦ Vice-president ◦ 3 research directors (2 in place, advertising for 3rd) ◦ 2 research analysts (currently interviewing)  Support staff  Budget ◦ $3 million, going to $5 million in steady state ◦ Minimum 70% directly on research  Bulk of research activity to be conducted via external contracts  All research public; authors encouraged to submit to peer-reviewed venues 3

4.  Understand how PSE registration and persistence rates are related to ◦ Students’ personal characteristics – financial and non-financial  Already considerable research and an emerging consensus ◦ The pathways chosen – college then university, etc  Much less research and no emerging consensus  Recommend policy options that might improve the probability of success ◦ Not even much research 4

5.  A multi-party, multi-year accessibility project covering the PSE participation life-cycle ◦ Piecing together data from various national and provincial sources ◦ Modeling students’ choices and testing hypotheses  Explaining inter-provincial differences in accessibility and persistence rates ◦ Focus in particular on supply-side factors  Interventions (experiments) aimed at identifying effective policy instruments ◦ E.g., replace loans with grants 5

6.  Input measures suggest that Ontario’s learning quality compares poorly to that in other jurisdictions, and that it is has been in slow decline for several decades  Yet output measures suggest the opposite conclusion  We have very little direct evidence on learning quality in Ontario (or anywhere else for that matter)  But NSSE can perhaps serve as an instrumental variable for learning outcomes, making empirical testing and experimentation possible 6

7.  Examining variations in NSSE outcomes among Faculties and programs within institutions  Interventions at 9-10 universities in 2008/09 ◦ Experiments with various learning methodologies/approaches ◦ NSSE results as instrumental variable for learning outcomes  International, multi-disciplinary symposium on teaching and learning, Fall 2008  Workshop on graduate and professional education for Spring, 2008 based on recent GPSS survey  Question: time for a Canadian DEEP (Documenting Effective Educational Practice)? 7

8.  Accountability does not imply ranking!  There is considerable variation among Ontario institutions in how they assemble and use PIs for academic planning purposes  Challenge is to identify a set of performance indicators that ◦ Disseminates information to students and other stakeholders ◦ Supports differentiation in institutional missions and visions  Common University Data Ontario (CUDO) and the proposed Common University Data Canada (CUDC) are promising avenues  G-13 data exchange a model for more rigorous benchmarking? 8

9.  Workshop on university performance indicators (date: Nov 23)  Paper on a data architecture for a PSE quality framework  Paper on lessons for PSE from the health care sector  Papers on best quality assurance practices internationally and in other provinces  Analysis of Multi-Year Agreement (MYA) experience 9

10.  Ignore the supply side at your peril! ◦ Can the system accommodate all qualified PSE applicants? ◦ Can it provide them with a quality learning experience? ◦ How do we at the same time sustain and enhance research capacity?  What exactly do we mean by accommodating demand? ◦ College or university ◦ Geography ◦ Institution ◦ Program ◦ Learning approaches  College/university transfers and collaborative programs a key feature of system design  View system design as a classic example of a principal- agent problem ◦ Incentives, not coercion 10

11.  History of PSE sector in Ontario around general theme of challenges and responses  Multi-party, multi-year project on college- university pathways  Case studies of college-university programs  Paper and major conference on “PSE in Ontario: challenges and responses”  The GTA enrolment challenge 11