Research on post-secondary access issues in Canada.
During its tenure, the Canadian Millennium Scholarship Foundation sponsored and published a great deal of invaluable research about all aspects of post-secondary education, including access issues.
You might be familiar with some of these reports already, but there are some real gems in here, and a little refresher is always good. And if you haven’t yet encountered this material—settle in for some tremendously helpful information and analysis.
From the Closing the Canadian Millennium Scholarship Foundation’s full list of publications, here are a few that we’ve found most enlightening:
The poverty rate is closely correlated with post-secondary education.
While the median wealth of young families fell by half between 1984 and 2005, it rose by almost 40% for those in which the major income recipient was a university graduate aged 35 to 54.
[Morissette, René & Zhang, Xuelin. "Revisiting Wealth Inequality" in Perspectives on Labour and Income."]
It’s a sobering statistic: the poverty rate is twice as high for families headed by someone without a university degree as it is for those headed by a university graduate. Even more striking is that the income gap between university graduates and those without a degree is growing—this graph shows just how much over the past twenty-five years:
Data from "Revisiting Wealth Inequality"; charts created by CPSAP.
The groups facing the biggest challenges.
We all know that access to post-secondary education (PSE) isn’t a sure thing—there will always be some people who aren’t aware of their educational options, and some who aren’t able to pursue them. But the challenges are particularly acute in certain demographic groups, which have a strikingly low rate of participation in post-secondary education.
This chart, prepared for the YMCA and CPSAP, shows the disproportionate rates of participation in post-secondary education among two groups facing perhaps the biggest challenges in accessing education: those whose parents had low rates of participation in PSE, and Canada’s First Nations.
It is because of statistics like the ones shown above that CPSAP targets those groups specifically in its programming—it’s an attempt not just to increase overall rates of participation in PSE, but to remedy some fundamental social inequalities, which see immigrants and First Nations Canadians at a significant disadvantage with regards to socio-economic stability and improvement relative to the population at large.
How information deficits discourage high school students from pursuing post-secondary education.
One the last documents issued by the Canadian Millennium Scholarship Foundation was a report titled “An Examination of Barriers to pursuing PSE and Potential Solutions.” Put together by Ekos Research in 2009, the report discusses the concerns expressed by high school students who had decided not to pursue further studies. It’s a fascinating analysis, and is available in full here, but practicioners who are specifically concerned with access issues, and especially for those who are concerned with CPSAP’s kind of programming, here are some of the most pertinent findings…
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Learn all about CPSAP and the fabulous people who have been involved in our programs.
Today we’re very excited to launch our official Canadian Post-Secondary Access Partnership (CPSAP) blog. We hope this will become the meeting place for everyone whose life has been touched by CPSAP: whether you’re a You Can Go participant we’ve advised, a post-secondary institution in which we’ve placed students, or one of the generous donors who help make all this possible, we’re hoping to hear your stories and have you join in our conversation.
And if you’re not all that familiar with CPSAP…it’s nice to meet you. We’ll be discussing our various initiatives to alleviate post-secondary access challenges, and explaining just what those access needs are along the way. Think of this as a more personal, human-interest introduction to what we’re all about.
So, what is the Canadian Post-Secondary Access Partnership?
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