Lesson 4 - Understanding the Learners

3. Greater Diversity of Students

Probably nothing has changed more in higher education over the last 50 years than the students themselves. In ‘the good old days’, when less than a third of students from high schools went on to higher education, most came from families who themselves had been to university or college. They usually came from wealthy or at least financially secure backgrounds. Universities in particular could be highly selective, taking students with the best academic records, and thus those most likely to succeed. Class sizes were smaller, and faculty had more time to teach and less pressure to do research. Expertise in teaching, while important, was not as essential then as now; good students were in an environment where they were likely to succeed, even if the prof was not the best lecturer in the world. This ‘traditional’ model still holds true for most elite private universities such as Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Oxford and Cambridge, and for a number of smaller liberal arts colleges. But for the majority of publicly funded universities and two-year community colleges in most developed countries, this is no longer the case (if it ever was).

The student base has become much more diverse. For instance, in British Columbia, roughly two‐thirds of the full Grade 8 school cohort of 2007/2008 (67%) entered B.C. public post‐secondary education by Fall 2014 (Heslop, 2016). As state jurisdictions push institutions to participation rates of around 70 percent going on to some form of post-secondary education (Ontario, 2011), institutions must reach out to previously underserved groups, such as ethnic minorities (particularly Afro-American and Latinos in the USA), new immigrants (in most developed countries), aboriginal students in Canada, and students with English as a second language. Governments are also pushing universities to take more international students, who can be charged full tuition fees or more, which in turn adds to the cultural and language mix. In other words, post-secondary institutions are expected to represent the same kind of socio-economic and cultural diversity as in society at large, rather than being institutions reserved for an elite minority.

We shall also see that in many developed countries, university and college students are older than they used to be and are no longer full-time students dedicated only to lots of studies and some fun (or vice versa). The increasing cost of tuition fees and living expenses forces many students now to take part-time work, which inevitably conflicts with regular classroom schedules, even if the students are formally classified as full-time students. As a result, students are taking longer to graduate. In the USA, the average completion time for a four-year bachelor’s degree is now 5.1 years.