While digging through the R rating, I made some concerning discoveries. Including this one: the secondary education program has one of the lowest graduation rates among the main programs offered in universities in Quebec.
Posted at 6:30 a.m.
And yet, this graduation rate has declined significantly in recent years, according to data provided to me by the Ministry of Higher Education.
Thus, the graduation rate after 4 years of study – the normal duration of the baccalaureate in secondary education – was only 47.3% in 2020. This rate has been in constant decline since a peak of 56.2% in 20161.
To get a more accurate picture, it is best to add 2 years to the course of studies (a single course postponed or a single failure can cause the graduation rate to drop in 4 years). After 6 years of study or less, therefore, the proportion of enrollees who had completed their baccalaureate in secondary education was 72% in 2020, which represents a decline of 5.2 points compared to the rate of 77.2% of 20181.
Of the 15 university programs compared, that of secondary education comes in 12and rank, far behind social work (89%), business administration (86.6%) or civil engineering (82.6%). Ouch!
The graduation rate for preschool and primary education is higher than that for secondary education, at 79.7% in 2020 (after 6 years). But here again, this graduation rate for primary school is down, and it falls below 80% for the first time in 5 years (the graduation rate for the previous 4 years was 82.5% on average).
What is going on ? Difficult to answer this question.
Is it possible that the arduous working conditions of high school teachers, especially the regular public, have encouraged some students to give up, especially after their internship? Could the negative mediatization of the profession have eroded the vocation?
This is unclear, since the absolute number of 6-year graduates was essentially the same in 2020 at 1053 as in previous years. There are therefore more candidates at the start who try their luck, but who fail. Some might not have the skills to teach, whether it’s math, French or something else.
“Some students who are very brilliant in math are put off by groups of teenagers when they do their internships in schools,” explains Pascale Lefrançois, dean of the faculty of education sciences at the University of Montreal. .
At the Université de Montréal, the graduation rate for math teachers is much lower than the average for secondary education programs.
At UQAM, it is argued that some high school education students drop out when they see that there are few openings in their chosen field (geography, physical education, etc.).
According to Mme Lefrançois, it is not the French test to which future teachers are subjected – whose success is required for obtaining the diploma – which is in question. Most dropouts occur during the first year of the baccalaureate, before the test, she explains.
Anyway, let’s hope that the recent improvement in the working conditions of teachers, especially their remuneration, will have an attraction effect on young people for this essential profession.
Another possible explanation for the relative weakness of secondary school teaching diplomas is the greater proportion of weaker students than in many other university programs.
According to my observations, graduation is strongly correlated with the level of the R score, which measures academic performance in CEGEP. In fact, the lower the average R-score of students, the lower the university graduation rate, and vice versa.
In law, for example, where the average R score is particularly strong (31.9), the graduation rate is 93.1% (over 6 years). At the other end of the spectrum, sociology ranks last for graduation (63.9%) and second to last for average R-score (26.2).
The graduation-R score correlation is even stronger when we draw a parallel with the minimum R score required of universities, rather than the average R score for admissions. According to my analysis, the programs where the contingents of students are the most disparate (large gap between the weak and the strong according to the R score) have the lowest graduation rates.
Thus, 4 of the 5 programs that have the most disparate groups are at the bottom of the graduation pack. This is the case in secondary education, computer science, history and political science.
In other words, it appears that the failure rates are higher when the faculties of certain universities give the chance to a larger proportion of weaker students, who have low minimum R scores, which is hardly surprising2.
In computer science, the graduation rate is only 68.8% after 6 years, and this low rate coincides with lower requirements for admission to some faculties (R rating of the last admitted student of 20 at the Université de Sherbrooke and 22.1 at Laval University).
It is also possible that the strong demand for computer scientists encourages some students to enter the labor market without completing the baccalaureate.
Social Work and Nursing
Moreover, the nursing and social work programs are in the opposite situation to that of secondary education: their graduation rate has been increasing steadily for 5 years.
In 2020, the graduation rate for nursing students stood at 89.2%, 5 points higher than five years earlier. In this case, the number of graduates also increased by some 500, to 1,811. In social work, the rate rose from 83.7% to 89% in 5 years.
Universities would benefit from looking into these success rates, even if it is not always in their interest to do so, given the dynamics of their funding (depending on the number of admissions). Indeed, betting on an increase in their graduation rate could encourage them to admit fewer students, which would reduce their income. To meditate.
1. The 2020 graduation rate actually represents the graduation of the fall 2016 cohort four years later. Or the graduation of the cohort of 2014 six years later.
2. To confirm this, one would need to have a statistic of the dispersion of student grades (the standard deviation for the R score), but the Office of University Cooperation (BCI), the organization that compiles the data, has not could provide us with this information.