There is one thing and the opposite in Quebec, when the time comes to assess the quality of our education system. One week we’re great and the next week we’re pocketed. What is it really ? It depends on the criteria used.
According to the Program for International Learning Assessment (PISA) tests, piloted by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 15-year-old Quebec students are among the best in the world and in Canada. In 2018, they occupied the 3and world rank in mathematics, the 6and rank in reading and 7and rank in science.
Although they enjoy solid international scientific recognition, the PISA tests do not tell the whole story. They essentially measure basic skills, and they do not assess general culture. One can, for example, obtain an excellent score in reading in these tests while having no literary culture. Nevertheless, the Quebec results are pleasing.
Why, then, do we continue to hear that our education system is lagging behind, especially compared to the Ontario system? It is the graduation, here, which is in question. In Quebec, in 2018, 9% of people aged 25 to 34 did not have a high school diploma. All the other Canadian provinces do better (between 5% and 8%).
Is it a disaster? According to demographer Simon Normandeau, it is important to put this data into perspective. In his contribution to the very instructive collective work The light of demography (Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2022), Normandeau specifies that, compared with that of other OECD countries, the Quebec dropout rate is not disastrous. “In Denmark, Norway and Sweden,” he writes, “no region obtains a dropout level lower than that of Quebec. Even Finland, often presented as the educational paradise in the world, does not do better, in this respect, than us.
It is not a question of concluding that all is well in the best of worlds. Normandeau insists on the advantages of a high level of education: higher employment rate, more satisfactory income, health benefits, more active social and political participation, concern for the environment, etc. A dropout is therefore always one dropout too many and, according to Normandeau on the basis of OECD data, he often comes from a family whose parents have little education. Interventions to break this vicious circle would therefore be appropriate.
At college, the situation is not perfect either, but there is no shortage of good news. In his preface to the study Academic success in college (Presses de l’Université Laval, 2020), economist Pierre Fortin notes that in 2019, “79% of young adults aged 25 to 44 had a postsecondary diploma (vocational, college or university) in Quebec and 74% in Ontario”. Young adults in Quebec therefore had an average of 15 years of schooling, a figure that rises to 15.2 years in Ontario.
Too many CEGEP students, however, drop out or delay obtaining their diploma. In this very detailed study conducted by Richard Guay, Pierre Michaud, François Paquet and Sophie Poirier, three main risk factors are cited: the general average in high school, the age of the student (the later you enter CEGEP, the more risk of dropping out) and sex (girls do better). The support measures to be implemented in order to improve success must therefore take this data into account.
The study also contains explosive information, summarized by Fortin: the best graduation rates from English-language colleges could be explained “two-thirds by their academic requirements, which are lower than those of French-language colleges in language and philosophy.”
At the university, finally, the thesis of the persistent academic backwardness of Quebec compared to Ontario is a myth, write the sociologists Benoît Laplante and Pierre Doray in The light of demography. Among French-speaking Quebecers born in the 1930s, 12.8% obtained a university degree (compared to 14.4% of English-speaking Ontarians). 28.8% of those born fifty years later achieved the feat (30.3% for Ontario). English-speaking Quebecers (32.7%), immigrants (53.5%) and their children (39.8%) do even better, but this is explained by demographic considerations.
For historical reasons, in Quebec, the wealthy strata represent a greater proportion of English-speaking society than of French-speaking society. Immigration policies, then, favor university graduates, and the proportion of people born abroad is higher in Ontario than in Quebec. Talking about the backwardness of Francophones under these conditions is a misinterpretation, conclude Laplante and Doray.