By Lucy Scholey, Assistant News Editor
Student unions and associations across Canada might have more push behind their lobbying efforts with data gathered from a new survey.
The Canadian Student Survey is designed and run by student organizations – the first such project in the country. Unlike past confidential reports conducted through research groups such as the National Survey of Student Engagement, this project will publicly publish its findings and the students will own the data.
“It’s filling a void,” says Arati Sharma, national director of the Canadian Alliance of Students Association (CASA). “Canada doesn’t do a fantastic job of data collection when it comes to post-secondary education. I think there’s a real gap in the research side of post-secondary education and the actual system.”
The voluntary survey launched Nov. 9 and will remain open for three weeks. Members from CASA-affiliated student unions, plus a few non-CASA members, are participating. Each school participates with approval from its respective research ethics board. The cost for each university is roughly $1,000. On top of these fees, CASA is putting $30,000 towards the project.
The Canadian Education Project, a new Toronto-based education research group, is co-initiating the survey. The group is a branch of the better-known Educational Policy Institute (EPI), based in the United States. EPI will analyze the data and publish it in a report, but the students still own the data, says Sharma.
Other student groups have partnered with CASA on the initiative, including the Alliance of Nova Scotia Students Association (ANSSA), the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance and the Council of Alberta University Students.
Mark Coffin, executive director of ANSSA, says the decision to partner with the project stems from the need to understand issues concerning students as a whole.
“You hear a lot of anecdotal evidence from students,” he says. “The problems they’ve faced in student financial assistance, and the problems they face paying back their debt, or the views they have on where money should be going.”
“We want to put weight behind the advocacy efforts that we’re doing right now,” he adds.
ANSSA is contributing $3,000 toward the project. That money helps fund the survey’s implementation at the five ANSSA-affiliated universities. CASA is funding the remaining participation fees.
Rob LeForte, Dalhousie Student Union VP (education), says the DSU is participating in the project to uncover information about its own students, but also “to have Dal students represented in that national data. We wouldn’t want to see them left out of reports that were being generated and going to be presented to everyone federally and provincially.”
The DSU decided to allocate a portion of its ANSSA fees to the survey after it learned about it at an ANSSA retreat last August. Dal students each pay $2.50 toward ANSSA, amounting to roughly $35,000 per year.
Although the survey’s website says the project aims “to publish national and institutional-level reports,” the data won’t include all universities across Canada.
CASA is associated with 23 student unions across the country. Nineteen student unions are participating in the survey –14 are affiliated with CASA and five are not.
St. Thomas University’s Student Union isn’t participating because of several concerns surrounding the project.
Ella Henry, STUSU’s VP (education), says she’s still unclear about the project’s details since she first heard about it from the executive director of the New Brunswick Student Alliance.
“What we would really like is an explanation because it’s very frustrating to find out, not from CASA, but from conversations with a different organization that CASA agreed to contribute this money and then after several phone calls and e-mails, not have an answer as to where that $30,000 came from,” she says.
The union might have participated, but its research ethics board had concerns with the project including its lack of scholarly research, says Henry. She contacted Sharma, who told her EPI would contact her about her concerns. They never did. The project launched, without STUSU.
“I think it was a really rushed process and I don’t think the decision to fund that was done very openly or very accountably to members,” Henry says.
Sharma says the survey launched quickly to gather data at a time when students were more likely able to participate.
“The timeline was a little tight, but, I mean, each one of our student associations was consulted,” she says.
But Henry says by the time Sharma contacted her again, the decision to launch the project had already been made.
“We were consulted on whether the STUSU would like to participate, not whether we thought CASA should spend $30,000 on the survey,” she says, adding that CASA’s budget can’t cover that amount for a project.
When asked how CASA produced the $30,000, Sharma said to speak with the treasurer. He didn’t respond before this article went to print.
The DSU hosted CASA’s Annual General Meeting this past week. As of last Sunday, the STUSU planned to put forward a motion asking for financial and decision-making details about the process leading up to the survey.
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