UBC pushes Canada to put primary focus on students

The University of British Columbia has created a student-centred strategic plan, calling it a first-of-its-kind document in Canada for a country that has gone too far in the direction of leaving its students to navigate the basic challenges of life and academia.

The plan, three years in the making, establishes and formalises commitments UBC makes to its nearly 70,000 students in areas that include healthcare services, career development planning and financial assistance.

The idea has been shepherded by UBC’s vice-president for students, Ainsley Carry, an American who described himself as having arrived north of the border in 2019 surprised by the degree that Canadian institutions left their students – especially first-years and internationals – to fend for themselves, sometimes with deeply harmful outcomes.

“Everybody’s got a strategic plan for students, right?,” Dr Carry, previously vice-president for student affairs at the University of Southern California, said in an interview. “Not so in Canada.”

Canadian institutions do have various kinds of other strategic plans, Dr Carry acknowledged, in such areas as facilities planning, campus sustainability, university investment, sexual violence. And many of those plans do mention students, he said.

But Dr Carry said he saw upon arrival that UBC lacked a plan to specifically consider and address student needs and interests. He soon found that was the overwhelming norm across Canada, and began to hear stories from UBC’s own students about why that was a problem.

As one general example, he described a student from India who felt slightly ill, did not understand the workings of the student health centre, was told by a local hospital she would need to wait two weeks for an appointment, and assured her mother she’d get it examined once home. It turned out to be mononucleosis; the student spent four weeks in bed, failed most of her classes, and lost her scholarship, “because of something that we could have avoided by giving more access to care”, he said. “Those were the stories students were telling me.”

Central to the problem, Dr Carry told THE, is that the basic skills needed for a job such as vice-president for student affairs are generally not taught at Canadian universities. Those holding such jobs in Canada, he said, were either trained for it in the US or, more commonly, just progressed up the administrative ranks without truly being trained for the job.

“These are not educational concepts that are being taught in higher ed here,” Dr Carry said. “And Canada is not unique. Many European countries also have the model that students are adults and we don’t have to hold their hands through their outside-the-classroom experience.”

Dr Carry said he got a sense of the challenge he was confronting when, shortly after his arrival at UBC, he floated the student-centred strategic plan concept to other university leaders. “And I got this question like: why are we micromanaging students? Why are we holding their hands? Aren’t they adults? Leave them alone and let them figure these things out on their own.”

That philosophy may be understandable, Dr Carry said. But the problem, he said, was that students “are not figuring it out on their own – we do need to be a little bit more intentional, especially as we bring on board more international students from different countries”.

Dr Carry said he set about fixing the problem at UBC by hosting listening sessions where his staff bought pizzas and invited students to come and describe the challenges they faced. Altogether they heard from more than 400 students at 15 listening events over a year from 2019 into 2020. That produced the five priority areas of healthcare, career development, financial aid, campus equity and university communication.

While UBC postponed an official announcement of its student-centred strategic plan during the pandemic, it began taking steps that include building a new health centre where students can arrive with any concern and have it addressed; hiring an assistant vice-president for career development; and beginning a thorough review of ways to reduce costs for UBC’s neediest students.

Some Canadian universities probably will say, “How dare UBC micromanage students that way,” Dr Carry said. But every day at UBC, students are “demanding more, more and more from their university – mental health support, sexual violence prevention, alcohol prevention, affordability issues, childcare, housing, you name it”, he said. “I don’t know how they can resist these issues much longer.”

Canada’s main association of student affairs experts said it welcomed efforts to professionalise its field, but pushed back against the suggestion that many institutions were not already doing that.

“It is our experience as Canadian student affairs professionals,” the leaders of the Canadian Association of College and University Student Services told Times Higher Education, “that having students at the core of an academic or strategic plan is very common.”

“While the approach of creating a single plan that includes all aspects related to the student experience may be unique, especially for research-intensive universities, it is not the only way, or necessarily the best way, this work is happening across Canada,” the executive director of Cacuss, Jennifer Hamilton, and its current president, Patty Hambler, said in a joint response to UBC’s characterisations.

Canadian universities have numerous graduate programmes that focus on post-secondary educational leadership, said Ms Hamilton and Ms Hambler, director of student affairs and services at Douglas College.

They include programmes at Simon Fraser University, the University of Toronto, Royal Roads University, and Memorial University of Newfoundland, Ms Hamilton and Ms Hambler said.

Canada also has examples of student affairs leaders who rose to become presidents of their institutions, affirming their high levels of competency, said a former president of Cacuss, Mark Solomon, a senior adviser to the president on reconciliation and inclusion, and formerly dean of students and indigenous education at Seneca College. They include Craig Stephenson at Centennial College and Janet Morrison at Sheridan College, Mr Solomon said.

Still, there is room for improvement, Mr Solomon said. “Student affairs is often taken for granted and discarded until those professionals are needed in a crisis,” he said.

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com