Professor Glen Jones, Emily Gregor, Lucis Padure, University of Toronto
This paper can be downloaded from: http://www.wun.ac.uk/ideasanduniversities/seminars/2008_programme/jones.html
Marshalling Resources for Change – System-level Initiatives to Increase Access and Success
June 10, 2008 by ideasanduniversities
Glen, Lucia and Emily,
Thank you very much indeed for sharing your meticulous research with us and for raising so many fundamental questions.
We were a bit pressed for time in discussion, so I wanted to ask again about how people react to being situated in a given population. My question is not so much about the validity of the analytical category or the robustness of the statistics, but rather about the sensitivities that come into play on the part of students and those who support them. Are people offended at the suggestion that they come from a population that is deemed to need increased access to post-secondary education? And is there a backlash from those who are not in such populations and who feel their chances might be diminished if others are in some way preferred? In the UK we talk about ‘widening participation’, and there is constant pressure from independent (private) secondary schools which see widening participation initiatives to get more state school pupils into the top universities as ‘unfair’ instances of ’social engineering’. Do you find anything comparable?
Related to this, I also wanted to ask about the relationship between your research and government policy. Are you having an impact on government policy? And, if so, by what mechanisms? The relationship between academics and policy-making has, I think, emerged as one of the major themes in the Ideas and Universities project, so it would be very useful to hear more about your experience in this regard.
Once again, many thanks for a very stimulating presentation.
Ian
Ian:
Thank you for your thoughtful questions.
Your first question on the sensitivities of individuals captured by definitions of under-represented populations deals with an extremely important, and complex, set of issues. In many respects this is really about the politics of identity (and self-identification), and my sense is that there has been relatively little empirical research on this specific question in Canada. The answer probably depends on the “category” and the individual. For example, the school systems in some provinces have devoted considerable resources to the identification of students with learning disabilitieis, and they have developed programs that support these students and encourage them to self-identify and advocate in their best interests. It is not surprising, therefore, that increasing numbers of students are self-identifying as having a learning disability, and there are increasing expectations that appropriate accomodations will be made. The situation is quite different for some other “categories.” All of these categories are, of course, complex, contested, and frequently intersecting. Many students of aboriginal heritage are “first generation” in that neither parent had any prior higher education, come from lower socio-economic background, and some of these students will have learning disabilities.
We have a long tradition in Canada of looking at issues of accessibility in terms of socio-economic status, gender and aboriginal status, but our analysis of other ways of looking at access in terms of other “categories” is relatively recent and the short answer is that we are some distance from fully understanding the sensitivies and perceptions of those individuals who do not attend postsecondary education.
At the conference where this paper was originally presented, Sir David Watson (from London’s IOE) discussed accessibility for under-represented populations as a wonderful example of a “messy problem” in policy terms, and I think that is a very insightful observation. We know we have a problem, but the problem is difficult to define and it is not unlikely that attempting to solve the problem will create others. Policy research becomes key in that we need to continually refine and redefine our understanding of the problem.
I have been very interested in the topic of your second question, the relationship between research and policy, for quite some time, in fact I have been involved in a number of projects that have attempted to look at these complex relationships. I contributed to a book that Jan Sadlak and Phil Altbach edited back in 1997 entitled “Higher Education Research at the Turn of the Century: Issues and Trends” that attempted to look at the infrastructure for higher education research (with a particular emphasis on policy research) in a number of different countries. That book led to a conference on higher education research and policy, and a second book (edited by Ulrich Teichler and Jan Sadlak) entitled “Higher Education Research: Its Relationship to Policy, and Practice” in 2000 (Oxford: Pergamon). I think that this is an area that requires further research and comparative analysis.
Does research have an impact on policy? I think that the general answer is yes, but any assumptions of direct or causal relationships are problematic. To some extent this returns us to the issue of “knowledge transfer” from an earlier seminar in this series. In terms of this specific paper, it was obviously designed to inform a policy discussion and it was written for a broader audience (which also explains why there is relatively little explicit discussion of theory – another important observation that emerged during the seminar). I think that the paper has been read by some individuals that are involved in policy decisions in this area. A larger number have probably read a brief summary of the paper. I do not know whether this work will have any impact on policy in Canada, but my hope is that it will, at the very least, stimulate some discussion and, perhaps, help to inform that discussion given our review of prior research in this area.
Thanks again for your questions.