Thank you, Ms. Chair.
My name is Aden Murphy, and I'm the chairperson of the Canadian Alliance of Student Associations and a student at the University of Alberta. I'm here with Spencer Keys, the CASA government relations officer, also based here in Ottawa.
The Canadian Alliance of Student Associations, or CASA, represents 320,000 students in 26 universities, colleges, and technical institutes all across Canada. We are here today to continue our opposition to scrapping the mandatory long form and talk about how this deepens the problem of effective information of learning in Canada.
In addition to federal advocacy, such as the lobby days that have been occurring on the Hill all the past week, we also conduct policy analysis and primary research. CASA conducted a research survey of 21,000 undergraduate students of our member institutions to get an accurate reading of issues relating to student debt, work habits, and literacy about student financial aid, and at a great cost to our organization.
This survey would have been impossible if we did not have a reliable benchmark against which to measure our sample. This was not an opinion survey but a professionally designed research survey built to withstand academic scrutiny, and it's already being used to help student financial aid administrators and civil servants consider areas of improvement in student financial assistance.
The mandatory census is the only statistically reliable means of weighting voluntary surveys, like the one done by CASA. The long-form census provides invaluable information on critical topics, including post-secondary attendance and completion rates; awarded certificates, degrees, and diplomas; as well as interprovincial, interterritorial, and international flows of skilled personnel. One example of how the census is being used is that it benchmarks the enrolment projections that the governments, like Alberta's, use to plan long-term enrolment growth at institutions.
The reliability of the mandatory long form is essential to planning that framework, which, for example, sees the growth of nearly 500 students at the University of Lethbridge over the course of the next decade. Inaccurate data could easily lead the province to underestimating enrolment growth and cause a gap between the number of seats and the number of qualified students from southern Alberta able to attend that institution. This is one important example of where adequate, accurate data helps post-secondary education.
Canada already suffers from a lack of adequate, comparable data on our post-secondary system, and further cutbacks in the size and scope of learning data collected by federal ministries and departments is being contemplated. While planned long ago to end this year, it is very regrettable that the youth in transition survey is finished, and that the national graduates survey is only guaranteed for 2010-11.
Learning data has always been a problem in Canada. In stark contrast to the vast majority of industrialized nations, Canada does not have a centrally audited and comparable source of nationally collected data available to help evaluate the quality of higher education. In fact, in 2007 Canada ranked last among 40 OECD nations when it comes to the amount of post-secondary education information provided to Education at a Glance, an annual international survey comparing a wide range of indicators.
Our current learning infrastructure is highly fragmented and spread over multiple departments and institutions. This has resulted in the needless duplication of research and has prevented the establishment of efficient networks of data collaboration and the sharing of best practices, even though Statistics Canada is required by law to coordinate these activities.
Those departments and institutions that do collect and analyze learning information are not resourced to conduct the number and type of studies, both long-term and short-term, needed to address key questions about the major transitions throughout the lives of our citizens, starting data collection when a student enters grade school, rather than at 15, like the current youth in transition survey does.
Suffice it to say, the dearth of effective educational statistics at the government level means that the private sector has had to respond. Contributions like CASA's survey have had to fill the void, but those efforts are rendered much less effective without a mandatory census.
Our students are deeply concerned that this change will seriously impede the capacity of all interested parties to conduct comprehensive and timely analysis into higher education issues.
The mandatory long form must be brought back for the 2011 census. If issues around coercion are truly a concern, rather than changing the essential nature of the census, we prefer that public consultations be held to review the punishments given for failure to send back a census long form.
I'd like to thank you for your time. Thank you.