Senator Frum: Picking the Right College
At age 24, Linda Frum wrote The Guide to Canadian Universities. Now, 23 years later her own children are ready to head to college. In an interview with Macleans, she talks about her book and the state of higher education.
Q: You suggest students ask a series of questions—do you want a big school or a small school, a big town or a small town, a prestigious school, an intellectual school? One of my favourites—and I immediately sat down with my daughter and said, “You have to think about this”—was how important is beauty to you?
A: I’m a firm believer that our environment affects our mood and our psyche, and if you are in a beautiful old library that has stacks of books, and the chairs are made of soft leather, and you’re physically comfortable, that produces one kind of learning environment. Versus being in a portable, ugly structure that was thrown up with very little regard to aesthetics. There was this period where growth in universities coincided with terrible, austere, inhumane architecture.
Q: You called York University “ugly, impersonal, bleak, isolated and depressing.”
A: I was there recently, and they have tried very hard to change that. Actually, they’ve put up some quite wonderful buildings.
Q: Twenty years ago you outlined what was wrong with our university system. Your observations were all pretty?.?.?.
A: Harsh?
Q: No, relevant, still. Your first: “Universities don’t need more money, they need less.”
A: Then I felt that there was a watering down of the value by making university education accessible to everybody. If you’re going to do that, you need a massive infusion of money, which is exactly what happened. It’s extraordinary to see how successful U of T has been, McGill, Waterloo. If you said then that U of T could mount a $1-billion fundraising campaign, I don’t think anyone would have believed it.
Q: What changed?
A: People recognize that if we aspire to compete with the best schools in the States—as we do—then we have to play by the same rules, and the rules are that successful alumni have to contribute to help perpetuate their schools.
Q: America has a few superb schools and then mediocre schools, whereas Canada has a broad base of very good to excellent schools. What’s the trade-off between the States vs. Canada? Are your own kids looking south?
A: They are looking south, and the rule in this house is very clear. I agree: only a very small number of U.S. schools are superlative compared to what you can get in Canada. I don’t understand why a parent should spend 10 times more on an equal product. So it has to be a different product.
Q: That’s a rule?
A: The rule is—and we play this game all the time—“Is the school better than Queen’s?” Because Queen’s is the top, so then we play, “Is Swarthmore better than Queen’s?”
Q: Raise tuition was another of your fixes. Voila, tuition has gone way up.
A: I still believe that our tuition is a bargain and it’s too low. If tuition is about $5,000, the true cost of educating a single student must be at least triple that.
Q: You recommended introducing a compulsory first-year curriculum.
A: I still think it’s a great ideal, but maybe for a different time, maybe for a different world. My fear was that we were going to lose our respect and our appreciation of the liberal arts. That seems to be happening. And I don’t know if there’s any way to stop that, because India and China are looming over us, and Brazil, and if kids are preoccupied with keeping up with their global competitors, it’s hard to say, “No, no, no, you’ve really gotta read Plato before you start thinking how to be a better engineer.”
Q: Last one: “Raise entrance standards.”
A: Well, again, a lost cause. As a society we have decided that a university degree is the new high school degree: it’s something that everybody must have. And so having invested all this money into creating institutions to make sure everybody gets their degree, you can’t raise entrance standards. In 1965, five per cent of Ontarians had an average of 80 per cent and above, and now it’s 50 per cent. There’s no point raising entrance standards; the grades just follow.
