Mission Mandate and work plan Ken Norrie VicePresident

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

Mission and mandate 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) Priority research areas ◦ ◦ Accessibility Learning quality Accountability System design 2

Structure and Budget Council, chaired by Frank Iacobucci President and CEO – Jim Downey Research team ◦ Vice-president ◦ 3 research directors (2 in place, advertising for 3 rd) ◦ 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

Our accessibility research aims to 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

What’s underway or planned 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

Starting points for our learning quality research 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

What’s underway or planned 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

Starting points for our accountability research 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

What’s underway or planned 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

Starting points for our system design research Ignore the supply side at your peril! What exactly do we mean by accommodating demand? ◦ 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? ◦ ◦ ◦ 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 principalagent problem ◦ Incentives, not coercion 10

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