A Discussion of Some Issues Pertaining to the Structure of Postsecondary Education in Ontario and Some Suggestions for Addressing Them
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A review of the structure of postsecondary education in Ontario, particularly in conjunction with a review of its funding framework, is both appropriate and long overdue. There has not been a significant examination of the suitability of the existing structure of Ontario's system of postsecondary education since that structure was established in the 1960s. This, in spite of the enormous changes in the provincial, national, and global social and economic environment of postsecondary education and in postsecondary education itself since the 1960s. At the highest level of generality, we may say that the effectiveness of a higher education system in meeting societal needs is a function of two distinct factors: (1) how effectively each higher education institution performs its role; and (2) how effectively the mix of different types of institutions, and their relationships with one another, conform to what is needed, i.e. whether we have the most efficient configuration of institutions of different types and appropriate relationships among them. 1 For the past few decades, particularly beginning in the 1990s, the major preoccupation of higher education policy in Ontario has been with the first of these factors. In that regard, we have witnessed major initiatives pertaining to institutional accountability and institutional performance assessment. Among other things, these initiatives have resulted in the documentation of the outstanding accomplishments of Ontario's postsecondary institutions. However, no matter how well each institution does its job, the net result will be less than socially optimal if the whole configuration of institutions is inappropriate. Some limited attempts to examine the structure of postsecondary in Ontario were made in the 1980s and 1990s. 2 None involved substantial analysis of
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.016 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".