Ontario’s graduate certificate programs: an exploration into colleges’ perspectives and students’ decision-making processes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This mixed methods study explored the nature and role of one of the credentials offered by the Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology (CAATs) – graduate certificates – in school to work transition of Ontarians and it explored students’ decision-making processes when enrolling in these programs. The role of education in human capital theory underpins specific ways qualifications can be used for economic progress; however, in liberal market economies where an education logic dominates, such a role is not clearly defined. The conceptual frameworks that grounded my study included Iannelli and Raffe’s (2007) concept of transition systems, differentiation (cited in Parsons Platt, 1973, Rhoades, 1983), Perna’s (2006) model of student choice, and Reverse Transfer (cited in Clark, 1960; Hossler et. al, 2012). These were used to analyze data from: 335 program websites; statistical data from the Ontario government and Colleges Ontario documents; and, interviews with six institutional leaders, five program coordinators from five selected CAATs (out of 24), four third-party professionals and 17 students. The quantitative data included all graduate certificates offered by 22 English language Ontario CAATs in fall 2017. The conclusions drawn from this study suggest that graduate certificate programs are the only post-diploma credential offered by the CAATs where degrees are one of the key entry requirements. Due to the government’s policies and market pressures, these programs are relatively homogenous which contributes to isomorphism in Ontario CAATs. These programs produce highly positive labour-market outcomes and this study’s participants considered these program curricula to be closely linked with the job market. However, the system-wide data show that more than half of the graduates get jobs outside their fields of study. Participants perceived the level of these programs to be higher than baccalaureate programs and students enrolled in these programs to gain applied skills which were not offered by their previous education. This study contributes to the existing literature on role of qualifications in liberal market economies and may inform policy, improve program design and delivery, and help increase the understanding of role of these credentials in Ontario’s transition and higher education systems.
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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 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
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".