Bibliographic record
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to provide a data-based comparison of the programmatic activity profile of Ontario colleges with that of colleges in other Canadian and international jurisdictions. The pursuit of that aim was impeded somewhat by the lack of data for many other jurisdictions on such basic indicators as total enrolment and numbers of graduates in different types of programs. Internationally the most widely available indicator related to the activity of colleges is the rate of attainment of short-cycle tertiary education (SCTE). Short-cycle tertiary education is the highest level of non-degree postsecondary education in the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED), and rates of SCTE attainment for all OECD countries are published annually by the OECD and are available from Statistics Canada for Canada’s provinces and territories. About 80% of the graduates of Ontario colleges are in this category of activity, and virtually all SCTE programming in Ontario is provided by the colleges. However in many jurisdictions SCTE accounts for a much smaller percentage of college activity, and organizations other than colleges are responsible for substantial percentages of SCTE. Subject to data limitations that are described in the paper, the author found that relative to other jurisdictions Ontario ranks high with respect to every indicator pertaining to the scale of college provision of high-level non-degree vocationally oriented postsecondary education, but low with respect to the role of colleges in facilitating attainment of bachelor’s degrees. The fact that relatively more people complete a program of SCTE in Ontario than in all OECD countries, and that the proportion of those who complete such a program that do so in a college is higher than in many OECD countries implies that that the extent of SCTE activity of Ontario colleges greatly exceeds that of all OECD countries. Ontario accounts for about 62% of all SCTE graduates in Canadian colleges, and ratio of the number of SCTE graduates to the number of graduates of the next lower ISCED category is much higher in Ontario than anywhere else in Canada. In addition, the percentage of graduates who are in the highest-level sub-categories of short cycle tertiary education, advanced diploma and graduate certificate programs, is much higher for Ontario than any other province. In contrast to the substantial scale of their non-degree programs, Ontario colleges have a relatively small footprint in regard to bachelor’s degrees. Compared to other jurisdictions where colleges have been allowed to award bachelor’s degrees for close to two decades or more, both the percentage of bachelor’s degrees that are awarded by colleges and bachelor’s degrees as a percentage of all college awards are quite low. In addition, Ontario has a quite low rate of college-to-university transfer. By itself, a comparative study like this one is an insufficient base for developing policy proposals. However, such a study can be useful for identifying anomalies that may warrant examination. Ontario’s relatively low ratio of the number of vocationally oriented bachelor’s degrees awarded by colleges to the number of high-level non-degree credentials awarded may constitute such an anomaly. Both the scale of its high-level non-degree activity and its track record of program assessment in a rigorous quality assurance system suggest that Ontario’s college sector has the capability to contribute more to the attainment of career-focused degrees than it has been allowed to thus far. However, the paper notes that there may be some strengths in the present configuration of programs in the colleges, and a decision to expand college degree activity should be based on a detailed analysis of the pros and cons of doing so, which was not the intent of this paper. Drawing upon examination of other jurisdictions, the paper concludes by noting some practices that might be considered in Ontario if there is a desire to expand degree programming activity of the colleges.
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 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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.025 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.023 | 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".