SECOND ROUND OF PAPERS IN GROUNDBREAKING CANADIAN POST-SECONDARY EDUCATION RESEARCH PROJECT RELEASED TODAY

SHOW SOCIO-CULTURAL-NOT FINANCIAL-ASPECTS MOST CRUCIAL IN LOW-INCOME STUDENT PARTICIPATION IN POST-SECONDARY EDUCATION

SUGGEST NEW POLICY EXPLORATIONS TO REFLECT THESE FINDINGS

The Measuring the Effectiveness of Student Assistance project today released the second set of working papers in a series of new research in the area of post-secondary education in Canada. These papers examine issues of youth participation in post-secondary education, and specifically look at the impact of socio-cultural and financial factors on access to post-secondary education using Statistics Canada's Youth in Transition Survey (YITS). Collectively, the papers show that while significant gaps in post-secondary education participation rates exist between youth from higher and lower socio-economic groups, it is socio-cultural factors-notably parental education levels-rather than financial ones that account for most of the participation gap.

In the first paper, Drs. Ross Finnie (University of Ottawa) and Richard Mueller (University of Lethbridge) demonstrate that a significant influence on a student's decision to access post-secondary education comes from parental education, rather than parental income. In addition, they find that youth engagement in secondary schools is a major determinant of access, as are feelings of competence and confidence at school. As well, cognitive development, particularly scores in the reading portion of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), are crucial predictors of access to post-secondary education.

In the second paper, Dr. David Johnson (Wilfred Laurier University) looks at youths' decisions to access post-secondary education through the variation in annual increases in and the absolute values of tuition costs by province. He finds that there is only very weak evidence that higher levels of tuition, on their own, alter the probability that a student continued into university from a secondary school. When data from the Province of Quebec is excluded, the probability for this effect disappears completely.

In a third paper also related to access issues, Drs. Michael Hoy, Louis N. Christofides, Zhi (Jane) Li and Thanasis Stengos (University of Guelph) examine students' decisions to enter university as an evolutionary process involving student aspirations, parental expectations and grade attainment. They find that females at age 15 have higher overall post-secondary education aspirations than their male counterparts, and are thus more likely to change these aspirations to include higher post-secondary aspirations; the result is that a significantly higher fraction of females decide to attend university by age 19. Many of the same family background characteristics that appeared to influence grade attainment are also correlated with aspiration levels.

These research results strongly suggest that the cause of the participation gap between rich and poor is less financial than it is cultural, and suggests that current government policies in place-in particular existing student aid programs-have been reasonably effective at removing financial barriers. However, new policy efforts around access to university from high school should be explored that can better focus on lower-income students and non-tuition factors in access decisions from university to high school. As well, the MESA project will continue to research this area in order to continue to explore these significant findings.

Background information on the MESA project

The Measuring the Effectiveness of Student Aid Project, or the MESA Project, is a four-year research effort being conducted through the Educational Policy Institute and the School for Policy Studies at Queen's University on behalf of the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation. It was designed to observe low-income students in post-secondary education over the period of three years and answer the following four questions:

• After graduating from high school, teenagers coming from low-income backgrounds face a choice as to attend college or university, or not. For those who did attend, how do they compare to those who did not?
• Does providing more funding in a student's first few years of further education attract more low-income students to post-secondary education?
• Does providing more funding in a student's first few years of further education make it more likely for low-income students to stay in and graduate?
• Are low-income students different across Canada?

MESA is a unique project in post-secondary education policy research in Canada through its creation of a new set of longitudinal data, which follows low-income bursary recipients in Canada over a three-year period.

In addition, the MESA project solicited papers from some of the leading Canadian researchers in the field of post-secondary education; it charged them to uncover and the as of yet wholly undiscovered Statistics Canada databases that cover these issues areas. In doing so, these papers not only greatly expand the panoply of writing in post-secondary education policy research in Canada, but also lay the groundwork for future research in these critical areas.