By Peter Koven
At Ashbury College, the graduating students all know they’re going to university.
In the Ottawa area, Ashbury College is the most prestigious of all private schools. Of the graduating students, 100 per cent go to university. Of those, 75 per cent get scholarships, and 80 per cent get into their preferred school and program.
“Social class may make a difference,” says Susan Gottheil, associate vice-president of enrollment management at Carleton University. “Private school students have really grown up with the expectation that they’re going to get into post-secondary education.”
Ashbury does everything possible to ensure its students are prepared for university. In fact, it even has a guidance office for students that deals exclusively with university admissions. Its responsibilities include working on applications, running seminars, setting up presentations by universities and past students and writing letters for scholarships. Not surprisingly, a faculty survey suggested it’s the office that Ashbury parents like the most.
This type of one-on-one guidance guarantees that students stay on top of the applications process.
“Basically, (the office) regulates everything having to do with university admissions. If you fall behind on something, they’ll tell you,” says Brook Simpson, an Ashbury student.
Simpson has a prototypical Ashbury pedigree. He’s interested in a wide variety of extracurricular activities that keep him constantly busy; his father is well-known Globe and Mail columnist Jeffrey Simpson. The 17-year-old, currently in Grade 12, has become used to the individual attention the school offers. He’s never had a class with more than 20 students; he estimates the average is about 15.
Next year, he hopes to study political science and history. He’s leaning towards attending McGill, a school known for its gigantic class sizes, particularly in first-year courses. He thinks he’ll be ready, but admits that it will be a change.
The biggest challenge for private school students entering university is the time management factor. Ashbury’s rigid daily structure leaves them little free time over the course of the day. This causes problems when these students suddenly find their time completely unstructured in university.
“You hear it all the time from our teachers, ‘Next year no one’s going to care, so you have to get into the habit of being independent,’ ” Simpson says.
He says the school occasionally brings in former students who talk about how well they adjusted to university after life at Ashbury, but at the same time, he says he’s heard stories of Ashbury students dropping out.
It’s a concern for the school, which tries to get students to become more independent.
“For many students, it’s choosing the university culture,” says Tam Matthews, Ashbury’s headmaster. “Where they’re used to having their day scheduled for them, suddenly they have this time. We do try and provide more flexibility in the later years to help them adapt to that. And academically, we have them take further responsibility for their studies.”
It’s a different story in the public system.
While guidance is available for students and parents, it is ultimately up to the students themselves and their parents to apply and stay on top of the application process and keep their grades high.
Alison Green, head of student services and career education at Lisgar Collegiate Institute, thinks her students adapt extremely well. She says that they tell her regularly that they felt well-prepared for the university life, despite the pressures they face.
“When the students come back and they visit us, they find they’re quite well prepared,” she says. “Certainly the university life is fairly unstructured, but we have an active extracurricular program here, and that provides a lot of leadership opportunities, and the students that have come back have found them very helpful.”
While the more unstructured environment of the public school might help students adapt to university, many public school students have to carry jobs as well in order to pay for it, and Green believes many of them work far too many hours.
The first year of university, she explains, is the hardest to pay for, as the students only have two months of the summer to work after graduating high school as opposed to four in university.
This puts more pressure on them to work more hours during the school year.
Martha Wood, principal of John Fraser Secondary School in Mississauga, a public school, also believes her students adapt extremely well to university, but wishes she had the ability to do some of the things with her students that the private system allows.
“The private schools have a lot of advantages. They’re smaller, so they can have more contact with kids. They don’t have to follow the curriculum to a T; they can take pieces out and do what they wish. There are some things they can force the kids to take like public speaking that are really useful in university. I don’t have that latitude.”
There are no studies in Ontario that compare the academic grades of public and private school students, but the Ontario University Council of Admissions insists there is no difference.
And so the debate still goes on as to which system prepares them the best.
“That’s always a tough question,” says George Granger, executive director of the Ontario Universities Application Centre. “Certainly a big part of it is academics, but it’s also personal experience. Are they ready to live away from home? How will they apply their own personal code of attention and discipline? Students need time to adjust, some have to carry a part-time job, some don’t have to. So it’s very hard to relate success in university to where they went to school.”
Nonetheless, Simpson believes that he will be ready, but isn’t sure about some of his classmates.
“I think I’ll be ready, but there’s a lot of people here who get maybe overly sheltered. I think for a couple of people it’s going to be a big shock.