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Grades and university admissions

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Today is report card day. I’ve looked them all over and I don’t think there are going to be any surprises for parents. A few positive bumps, a few dips, but overall pretty good results for students at our school. Further to this, I’ve only heard positive news from our grads about getting into the programs they want to get into. This last point, post high school admissions, is the only reason grades are really important… but I can spend hours telling you why marks shouldn’t be the only thing that matter.

I haven’t looked at the stats recently, but pre-covid stats about drop out rates during or after the 1st year at the top two universities in our province were 14% and 12%. I know some of these are students changing their minds, or other legitimate reasons, but I also know a large percentage of those dropouts are students who just couldn’t handle the change from high school. Most were probably straight ‘A’ students. They did well on all of their report cards. They were good at high school. They were good at giving the teacher what they wanted. They were good at test taking.

Then they head off to university. With no parents or teachers policing them, and no regular routines to follow, without after school activities that they used to fill their high school evenings with, there is suddenly a lot more responsibility to manage time. With professors not outlining assignments as clearly, or not providing samples of expectations, the work seems harder to manage and still get top grades. And for some, the freedom away from strict schedules is a chance to rebel a bit, and late nights don’t go very well with school work production and studying. There are as many variances to the reasons as there are students, but 12 and 14 percent drop out rates are a significant number when you consider the thousands of students who apply and don’t get into these top universities. Those are high percentages of top students not handling the transition.

Grades don’t tell the whole story.

What did students create? How did they build community? How did they manage their time? What does their portfolio look like? Portfolios aren’t just about art, they can be projects. It’s not surprising that a kid like this gets into a top music program in the country and wins awards, or when this kid gets into art school, or one of these kids gets into a small 40-student two year business program, and the other one gets into Mechatronics. It’s disappointing when a kid like this doesn’t get into the Ivy League school school he wanted to, but he still got into Computer Science at UBC, and  he didn’t drop out after his first year. None of these kids have or will drop out after a year, unless they decide they want to do something different.

All of these kids were ‘good at school’, but that wasn’t all that they were. They were students who had opportunities to work on their passions while in high school. They were students who had time in their schedule to decide what they were going to do, and they learned to manage that time… like they would have to at university. Not all of them were straight ‘A’ students, but all of them were successful students that got to demonstrate more than just good marks on tests.

To get into university my average was 73%. By the 4th year at my university, back in 1990, the average to get into the same general arts program was 81%. Had I been born just 4 years later my meager average would not have gotten me into my university of choice. Today, most popular programs at top universities demand an average well above 90%. But I have to wonder, how many of these high achieving students are going to drop out after a year? How many of them will have high school experiences that truly prepare them for the transition into these high stakes programs?

What other evidence should universities put weight on besides marks? I’d take a ‘B’ student with curiosity, drive, and a wide variety of interests over a straight ‘A’ student who fights for every 1/2 percent they can on a test. I’d take them in my university. I’d hire them at my company. I’d even be more likely to want them as a colleague or a friend. Grades should matter, they just shouldn’t be the only thing that matters, and the stakes on them shouldn’t be so high. Being a good student should also mean being a well rounded students, and that would improve the success rate of students finishing more than just one year at a university. When grades are used as the only measure to weed out students, many of the students being weeded out are exactly the students universities are wanting.

Defining the Unconventional

Inquiry Hub is a very different school than a conventional high school. Students get a lot less direct instruction, they do a lot more group work and presentations, and they get time in their day to work on passion projects. These passion projects serve as their elective courses, and they get credit for doing them. And while we can’t offer the amazing array of electives courses students get in a large high school, students get to go in-depth on topics of interest in a way that they just don’t normally get to in a ‘regular’ high school.

Despite our grads moving on to programs like engineering and computer science, and despite acceptance to UBC, SFU, Emily Carr, BCIT, Waterloo, McGill, and other universities, colleges, and technical schools, we still get parents concerned that somehow their kids will be disadvantaged by going to our school.

Our kids transition to university very well, and do not struggle in their first year, unlike 12-15% of grads across the province that graduate high school successfully then don’t make it through their first year of university. But incoming parents are still worried that their kids won’t be prepared for university. The skills they learn in our school to self advocate, self-direct, and structure their own learning are exactly the skills student don’t get in far more scripted learning environments where the teacher tends to determine what students are doing for almost the entire day in a traditional block schedule.

Skills learned at Inquiry Hub not only help students when they get to university, but these skills also help students be more entrepreneurial, more innovative, and more prepared to be productive in a knowledge economy. Our students will prepare presentations for a midpoint in a project that would blow away what a team would do for a final project in another school, or even what a marketing team would do for a client pitch. Guests in our school are continually blown away by the confidence and professionalism of student presentations.

We are still iterating, we are still learning, we are still figuring out how to help students who struggle… but that’s part of what makes the school great. The environment is dynamic, flexible, and responsive. And students learn that learning is a process. They learn to share their learning in meaningful ways. And they learn to be productive members of a learning community. If that’s considered unconventional, we’ll just keep being unconventional.

University entrance

I find it interesting that universities struggle with retention and dropout rates, yet year after year they seem to focus on the same parameters for entry… namely marks. It gets more and more competitive to get into universities, with higher and higher marks, and these schools hire people whose sole job it is to help kids stay in school after they arrive. Despite having these teams do their thing to retain students, many universities don’t lower their dropout rate.

Maybe marks aren’t the only thing that matter. Maybe students can get straight ‘A’s in high school without ever getting the skills to be successful outside of classrooms that are set up to ensure compliance and following a teacher’s lead through a course.

I know a student who spent hundred of hours doing research projects that far exceeded anything a typical high school student does. I’m talking about computer programming and Artificial Intelligence research that required university level courses to be done on his own time. He applied to some Ivy League schools and didn’t get in. This kid will be successful wherever he goes… some students that will get into these Ivy League schools instead of him will not. Oh, and not only were his marks great, he was in the 98 percentile on his SAT scores.

But it’s the balance of drive, determination, focus, and interest in learning that makes this kid an amazing candidate, not his SAT score and good marks. He’ll get into a great school. He will be extremely successful. He will not drop out after 6 months or a year. But how many students will?

How many students will meet the university requirements, be accepted, and still not make it through their first year? And how is it that universities can’t figure out the data points to choose kids like this over kids with high grades that will really struggle when they leave a sheltered high school experience and head off to university?

As long as universities focus primarily on marks, this will drive high schools to focus on grades. This will drive high school students into classes and programs that are about outputting good grades, not producing intrinsic learners, passionate about learning, and ready to take on all the challenges universities have to offer.

“The purpose of a system is what it does.”

I just went back to my very first blog post, originally written on March 29th, 2006, and added with a reflection to DavidTruss.com 2 years later. “The purpose of a system is what it does.”

First of all, it’s hard to believe that I’ve been blogging for 16 years! At the time of my reposting this first post onto my own website, I wrote about my 2 year journey to that point, “As I approach the two year mark since first blogging this, I can honestly say that becoming a blogger has been absolutely transformative! I feel like I’ve learned more in the past 2 years than I have in 22 years of one kind of institutional learning or another.“

Now going back to the point of that post, I wonder what the purpose of our current systems are?

Social media seems to be about gaining and keeping attention at any cost.

Governments seem to be about managing risk in wasteful ways.

Law seems to be about expensive litigation with justice sometimes prevailing.

Education seems to be about ranking students for university.

Higher education seems to be about putting students into debt to pay for credentials.

Of course there are exceptions, shining examples of how things could be. But how many of our systems do things that, if you look at them you think, that’s not the purpose of that system? And if the results aren’t what we want, if our systems keep giving us unintended results, at what point do we recognize that these results are the purpose of our systems? And then, what do we do about getting to the real, intended purposes?

Disrupting higher education

Universities and colleges are going to be around for a while, but two things are disrupting the need for many students to attend an expensive school for four or more years;

1. Targeted Certification

2. Coronavirus

Tackling the second one first, students are questioning the value of what they are paying to go to school, when suddenly most or all of their courses are online due to COVID-19. The interesting thing is that not all of them are going to head back to class and think that the experience is still worth it. Smaller universities are already struggling and if things don’t bounce back, the cost of doing business on a smaller scale are going to force costs to rise. Lower enrolment and higher costs are a double edged sword that some universities won’t survive.

As mentioned, targeted certification is another blow to the modern university. Have a look at this article Google Has a Plan to Disrupt the College Degree. For the cost of textbooks for a semester, Google is providing certification, in just 6 months, in fields where students can come out to decent paying jobs.

A few years back my nephew took an 18-month comprehensive course that cost a lot of money. The program could be paid up front, or by giving up a percentage of salary for the first 2 years after graduation. The skills training was so good and in demand, that most students took the expensive choice of paying up front, knowing they were likely going to land a 6-figure (or close to 6-figure) salary when they came out. It was a hard 18 months, but my nephew (who lives in California) landed a job with a Silicon Valley start-up soon after finishing this program.

Engineers, doctors and nurses, and other professions that require comprehensive certification will still require a university degree for quite some time now, but there is going to be a big shift to certifications and polytechnical schools.

I’m happy to have started higher education with a general arts degree that took me longer than 4 years to get. It was an amazing time. But I was able to get that degree with under $10,000 debt to my name. Many students today leave their first 4-year degree with much much more debt, and only the promise of more schooling before they can find a job and start paying back their debt.

Universities are becoming the place to either get professional degrees, or places for the affluent to spend a few years growing up, or a place for less affluent students to start accumulating debt. Meanwhile, job specific skills training and certification programs are sprouting up and challenging the need for many to go to university. This disruption is coming fast, and I think we are going to see many universities struggle to transition what they look like for a lot of students who will opt out of this path of higher education.

Crossing the stage

I lived in Ontario and had to do Grade 13 to finish high school, as was required if you wanted to go to university back in 1986. Recently I was thinking back to my grad convocation and while I remember the grad dance, I have no memory of crossing the stage to get my degree. I remember that at the end of the school year I needed to have a nose operation (it was broken playing water polo and needed to be re-broken to fix), and so I must have missed the stage crossing, or I’m sure I would remember part of it. But what I do recall missing is not my grad ceremony, but a huge year-end party at my friend’s cottage. I was so disappointed at missing that!

I don’t remember putting on a cap and gown, I have no recollection of a valedictorian, no photos with family and friends. Oddly enough, I remember the valedictorian for the school year before, reading his speech at an assembly.

Fast forward to university, and I didn’t go to my grad again. I went to my girlfriend’s grad the year before I was supposed to graduate. I know because the guest speaker was Benoit Mandelbrot, famous for his work with fractals. That was a memorable speech.

But as for me, I took an extra semester, and followed that with a semester off. Then the following year got special permission to take my final courses at a different university so that I could play varsity water polo. Then after I got my final course required I thought I would get my degree, but the convocation date came and went with no notice sent to me. I inquired to learn that I must actually apply for graduation, it isn’t just granted to me.

After my application was accepted, I was told I could cross the stage in the spring of the next calendar year, 3 years after I was supposed to graduate. At that point I didn’t have any friends still attending the university and didn’t bother going back to cross the stage with strangers.

I didn’t cross the stage until I was 30 and graduating from teacher’s college. I crossed the stage again for my Masters, eight years later. In both cases, my wife came to celebrate the event with me. So, I’ve had the experience, I’ve tasted the sense of accomplishment of crossing the stage in a cap and gown and receiving my degree… I just had to wait a lot longer than most.

Questions about September 2020

I was speaking to a friend that teaches at a university and she said about 30% of students that would normally come to her university next year are requesting a one year deferral, and taking a gap year. If that’s happening at universities across the province, and the country, that’s going to have a devastating impact on universities. Also, what are these students going to do next year? The two most productive things that students do in a gap year are work to save money, and travel (get some life experience). The job market is not going to bounce back quick enough, with unemployment at some of the highest levels in years, and most countries aren’t going to lift travel bans any time soon.

So what are all these gap year students going to do?

I wonder about the mental well-being of students who are not going to school, can’t get a job or travel, and are home and idle?

What can we do to support these students?

I also wonder if all of our colleges and universities will survive financially with such a decrease in students and revenue?

Will a percentage of high school students also stay home? Will there be a spike in high school students wanting to take online courses rather than try blended courses with teachers unfamiliar with this form of delivery?

Will private school students and their families decide that they should just go to public school rather than pay expensive tuition for an online experience?

We are headed into some very unknown territory and the impacts to what schooling might look like for September 2020 and beyond may not unfold in ways that we are expecting.

Coffee after class

It was second semester of my first year at the University of Guelph. I had a night class on Wednesday’s from 6-9pm. Now, decades later, I have no idea what the class was about, yet taking that class had a profound impact on my thinking.

Another student taking the class with me was Brian, an older, round-faced, bearded gentleman in his mid 30’s whom I knew from a class the previous semester. We sat near each other in the first class and afterwards he asked me, and one other student that I didn’t know, James, if we wanted to go for a coffee. James, was a moustache-less but goateed, hip-looking young man who was probably no more than a year older than me, but he made me look young next to him. He said he was meeting his girlfriend, and could she join us?

Upon leaving the the class, James’ girlfriend, Lara, approached us and he introduced us. Lara was just as hip looking as James. She had short-cropped hair with coloured highlights, and a nose ring. Or maybe it was James that had the nose ring, my memory is a little hazy, this was 32 years ago. (I’m not even 100% sure I have the names right, but these will do,)

And so it began, 10 weeks of the four of us meeting for coffee, creating some unforgettable memories after sitting through a class that was completely forgettable. While we talked about life, the universe, and everything, the conversation always seemed to gravitate to religion.

To give a little personal background, I grew up in a Jewish family, but we were not religious and my dad’s views were both secular and esoteric. What little faith I had was rocked by Charlton Heston in the Ten Commandments. I saw this movie shortly after moving to Canada, not yet a teenager.

The part of the movie that most impacted me was the scene that sets the stage for Passover, the only Jewish celebration we did with our grandparents.

To borrow from Wikipedia on Passover:

In the Book of Exodus, God helped the Israelites escape from slavery in ancient Egypt by inflicting ten plagues upon the Egyptians before the Pharaoh would release the Israelite slaves. The last of the plagues was the death of the Egyptian first-born. The Israelites were instructed to mark the doorposts of their homes with the blood of a slaughtered spring lamb. Upon seeing this, the spirit of the Lord knew to pass over the first-born in these homes, hence the English name of the holiday.

In the movie, a fog passes through the city bringing the plague that would kill the first born of the Egyptians and non-believers. You could hear the screams of Egyptian parents as their oldest children died.

Even at this young age, I remember thinking of this from the perspective of an Egyptian parent; A parent that did not wrong anyone, a parent who led a good life, in a loving family. I remember thinking, “What kind of cruel God would do this?” I could understand a God punishing the slave owners, but this was too much. It was vindictive, it was indiscriminate, and it was cruel. I thought, “I can not believe in such a vengeful God”.

The other three that met for coffee after class came from completely different religious standpoints. James was atheist. He had a Christian background, but his stance on religion was as indiscriminately hatefully as the Passover plague was to the Egyptians. Lara was Catholic, and while not fully devout, she held Christian values and principles. Her resolve in believing in God was as strong as her boyfriend’s atheism. Brian was… different.

Like the other three of us, this was Brian’s first year at university, despite being close to double our age. He joined the conversation not just with almost a lifetime’s more of life experience, but with life experiences that were rather unique. He was well travelled, articulate, and wise, but it was his unique religious background that made him quite an anomaly. Brian has been a “Hare Krishna devotee for 14 and a half years”. Looking back, it seems odd that he described his time with them that way. Why mention the 1/2 year?

Early on he was defensive about his time with this group. “People say that the Hare Krishnas drug their devotees… well I was head chef of our group for 9 years and I can tell you that not only are there no drugs, but they ate extremely healthy meals all the time.” As the weeks passed, he began to realize that we were just curious and not being judgemental when asking about his experiences in this faith. He shared a lot about them, but would never divulge what it was that made him leave.

Our conversations would routinely last until the coffee shop closed at 11. Sometimes we would stand outside for another 15-20 minutes conversing before we found a good place to stop. I remember a night where ‘James the Atheist’ became ‘James the Agnostic’. A week later, he was atheist again. I remember a ‘ladder and pyramid’ analogy for religions that Brian shared, that still influences my thoughts on religion today.

I remember having my thoughts and perspectives completely flipped, and also watching as my words would do the same to others. We used the Socratic method of asking questions to stimulate both argument and agreement. We got loud, but never angry. We learned from each other and honed our abilities to argue for the sake of good discourse.

I don’t remember seeing James or Lara after that. Brian didn’t come back to Guelph the next year. He went to India and was doing some charity work. I know this because he wrote a letter to update me. I have that letter in a box somewhere in my garage. I don’t remember any of the contents of the letter now, but I kept it because it was insightful, just like our conversations were.

If it was an era of smartphones and Facebook, I’m sure I would have kept in touch with Brian. He brought the four of us together. We taught each other. We challenged each other. We had one of the best ‘classes’ that I had at university. Four friends in a coffee shop.

Any colour

“A customer can have a car painted any color he wants as long as it’s black”– Henry Ford

There is a lot of folklore about this quote, but if I were to summarize it in a sentence: Henry Ford wanted to minimize options and maximize production, and every choice reduced efficiency.

Today our schools are all about choice. And our universities are all about differentiating themselves from the competition. People don’t just go to MIT Media Lab or Stanford d.school for the name, they go for the reputation, the proven success, and the opportunity to collaborate with other elite students. They go for the experience. People want to walk the halls of Yale or Harvard.

I know a family in the US who pay as much as my yearly salary for their two kids to go to University every year… And those kids are home taking online classes. It doesn’t matter what car people bought in September, they are all driving the same colour now.

How will this change people’s view of these schools? How much value do the hallways have? The Ivy schools will survive, even in a depression there is always a market for luxury items. But not all universities and colleges will survive post pandemic. Some schools will become fast food chains… All online year-round service, or half the price and double the students. Others will specialize. Others will partner with big business.

Universities are having a Henry Ford moment. They’ve been reduced to the same choice for all. It will be interesting to see what options come out of this.