New Students, New Paths? Students in Postsecondary Education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This special report analyzes the changing student population and the institutional restructuring that is taking place in the new postsecondary educational environment under the effect of school policies and choices. Its expansion through quantitative mass access to higher education or democratization leads a growing proportion of a particular age group to postsecondary education. At the qualitative level, it means a growing number of students from previously excluded social categories are enrolling. They are referred to as new, non-traditional, or even first-generation students. Compared to traditional students, they often have a full-time job and are financially independent, stop their studies, and have a family. More cross-disciplinary and vocational courses are offered and new institutions have been set up: community colleges (Canada, United States), general and vocational colleges (Quebec), university colleges (California, British Columbia), highly specialized schools (Switzerland), polytechnic schools (France), etc. The issue explores this evolution in different countries (Belgium, France, Canada, United Kingdom, and Switzerland).
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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 teacher head, 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".