In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Who Goes? Who Stays? What Matters? Accessing and Persisting in Post-Secondary Education in Canada
  • Frank Strain
Who Goes? Who Stays? What Matters? Accessing and Persisting in Post-Secondary Education in Canada edited by Ross Finnie, Richard E. Mueller, Arthur Sweetman, and Alex Usher. Kingston: Queen’s School of Policy Studies, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 374 pp.

This is a brilliant collection on many levels. Every policy-maker with a portfolio that focuses on access to post-secondary education and on the persistence to move from acceptance to graduation will have to read this, and I do not need to convince them to do so. The contributors are Canada’s best in the field, and no one actually working in this policy area would ignore their analysis. The Canadian Federation of Students and student unions across the country should also digest the arguments if they want to argue that lower tuition fees are the key to ensuring accessibility, given the conclusions are not supportive of their preferred policy option. But this collection also deserves to be read by a much wider audience, and I hope to convince this wider audience to actually engage with the arguments and analysis offered.

I have never encountered a better introduction to an edited volume that involves multiple authors. It brilliantly summarizes and synthesizes all the main arguments in a way which is accessible to a wide audience yet sensitive to technical and other important nuances. Every editor of a multiauthored volume could take this as a model. Indeed, one need not go beyond the introductory chapter to “get” the basic message. Yet going beyond the introduction yields incredible fruit. A faculty member or university administrator who discusses, over morning coffee, accessibility (and policies intended to make post-secondary education more accessible), problems associated with retention, or untested theories of why female participation rates are so much higher than male participation rates must read the entire collection. The contributors want policy debates to be informed by the best empirical evidence possible, and they succeed. I even think that the collection should be read by undergraduate students in the sociology of education, econometrics, or policy evaluation courses since it is a model of policy-motivated research at its very best.

The volume begins with a review of the existing literature identifying not only previous findings but also methodological and data limitations. One of the characteristics of all but one of the 14 papers found in this collection is the use of the Statistics Canada Youth in Transition Survey. This rich panel data set, which is carefully described in a separate chapter, allows the researchers reporting results in subsequent chapters to identify not only the impact of financial factors such as parental income and tuition fees but also relevant non-financial factors including high school grades, standardized test scores, school characteristics, peer influences, study habits, parental expectations, and parental educational attainment. The richness of the data set allows the researchers to conclude that non-financial factors are critically important determinants of accessibility and persistence.

The remaining chapters report analysis of different aspects of the decision to pursue and complete post-secondary education. The core of the collection is divided into three main sections covering access, persistence, and financial issues. I will not try to summarize the main conclusions of each individual contribution here. However, in hopes of encouraging a wide readership for the volume, I would like to briefly identify a couple of the questions addressed and the answers provided.

Ross Finnie and Richard Mueller find that the significance of family background arises more from “culture” than “money.” This conclusion is reinforced by other contributions including one by David Johnson, who concludes that no evidence can be found to link either attendance or persistence with tuition fees. The Finnie-Mueller contribution can also provide a model for researchers reporting results of multinomial logit models to an audience unfamiliar with this statistical technique. Students [End Page 382] and researchers interested in an effective method of reporting would benefit significantly from reading this chapter even if they have no interest in questions of accessibility and access.

The gap between male (25.7 percent) and female (38...

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