Stay in Canada or go to US?

Student Lounge International Students
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<p>@hoonose: That’s quite interesting. I’m really looking into applying to Cornell next year for engineering… If I don’t get in, I’ll stick with UfT Eng Sci. I believe that UfT is known for its harsh environment, though it’s quite doable if you put some effort. I personally know people whose average haven’t dropped from high school => UfT, and they don’t seem to be studying like crazy.</p>

<p>To be honest, I’m the kind of person who prefers harsher environments and exams that are worth a lot. After all, I tend to do better on exams and they usually pull my mark up 1-3% (which is quite a lot if we’re talking about the high 80’s - 90’s range). Needless to say, I’m not really that hyped about assignments… I tend to do a lot of EC’s but I’m good at last minute cramming so I tend to do better on tests/exams than assignments. I really don’t like all that hand-holding stuff either, but this is probably a high school thing and hopefully, it won’t continue onto university (regardless of which university). So now that I think about it, UfT actually might not be that bad for me. </p>

<p>I always thought Ivy Leagues gave generous financial aid… so I never thought much about the difference in tuition I thought there isn’t much of a difference in tuition anyways after you take financial aid into account. Isn’t that true, or they still make you pay 20 000+ a year (I come from the lower end of a middle class family)?</p>

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<p>I’m in a particular position to comment here on US vs Canadian differences. As background, I’ve been educated in both and have taught 20 years, both at US Ivy, state, and now Canadian school. Husband (along with many colleagues) have done the same. I also sit on boards in both countries, interact daily with faculty in both countries, and I can tell you we swap teaching materials, expertise, textbooks, cases, and exercises readily across the border. We attend the same conferences. We publish in the same journals. Most of our coauthors are across the border. This is normal. </p>

<p>There is so much variation in pedagogy and grading assessments from college to college within each country, that it makes global comparisons between the two countries quite difficult, if not impossible. Contrary to the prior poster, I have certainly never been more restricted to follow a curve or use exams in Canada than I was in the US. In both countries, my experience has been each college (and for that matter, each faculty and department), has it’s own grading norms, with some colleges having stronger norms than others. Similarly, pedagogy will vary quite a bit from college to college, and from faculty to faculty and department to department. Western Ontario’s business school tends to rely more on cases, looking just like Harvard; U of Toronto’s business school uses a mix of pedagogy, more like Stanford. A million examples. </p>

<p>What is important to know is that most Canadian and American professors belong to their field- they publish in the same journals, read and use the same texts, borrow and buy cases and materials to teach from the same basic sources. Many Canadian professors were trained in the US; many Canadian PhDs take posts in the US. The imagined differences are not that great (if they exist at all) when it comes to what you are taught and how you are taught. </p>

<p>What might be some differences are these issues, that may impact the college experience in both countries:</p>

<ul>
<li><p>It feels as though the grading standards in Canada are higher (highschool and college), and there is less pressure for grade inflation. This may be a false perception, I don’t have data to back it up. </p></li>
<li><p>Canadian schools for the most part are public and thus different funding sources means they look and feel much more like US publics than US privates.</p></li>
<li><p>Well known Canadian schools are large, but there are quite a few (less known to Americans) smaller schools that resemble liberal arts colleges (e.g. Mount Allison, Acadia, Bishops etc.).</p></li>
<li><p>Canadians tend to stay geographically closer to home (perhaps even living at home), rather than move across the country for their perfect fit college. Thus Canadian schools have fewer students living in dorms, especially beyond the first year. </p></li>
<li><p>Given the application process and the fact that students are more likely to go to the school closer to where they live, I believe there may be more diversity on Canadian campuses (both economic diversity, demographic diversity because ‘fit’ isn’t such an issue, and also academic ability variation). </p></li>
<li><p>Our school year is shorter. </p></li>
</ul>

<p>As with so many things about choosing colleges, and I’ve said this many many times before on here: I think you have to drill down so you are comparing apples to apples. Even something like “class size” or “accessibility to professors” or “research opportunities” or “average starting salary” or “culture” varies not only dramatically from college to college in a given country, but also across programs, majors and so on.</p>

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<p>Starbright - How is Mt. Allison’s reputation in Canada? And how similar is it to a private US LAC? I’m concerned that, for instance, the English department lists all of its lower-level courses as “lecture” and “seminar” is reserved for the upper-level courses.</p>

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<p>Funny you should ask this, because I only just learned about Mt. Allison myself! I think it’s not so well known out west and I’m much more familiar with research focused universities (both US and Canada). </p>

<p>But after reading about it on here, it sounds like a fabulous school I’d love to learn more about. </p>

<p>Pros I see:</p>

<p>It’s small (capped at 2200) and most students live on campus (great for a Canadian school), and beautiful campus and town. </p>

<p>Solid endowment and they are doing very well financially. Lots of new infastructure from what I gather.</p>

<p>It’s very inexpensive! Even though we’d have no problem covering US tuition, I want value for my money like everyone else…if my kid can get a great LAC experience for $6700 rather than $36000, hard to ignore.</p>

<p>Huge school spirit, positive culture, and the students rave about it (it gets very high ratings on the NSSE for example and top ratings for decades in MacLeans etc). </p>

<p>According to their website, they’ve produced 47 Rhodes scholars and 70% of their graduates go to grad school, med school or law. I also like that in the areas my D is interested, they have Canada Research Chairs (it’s a good signal of the quality of research being done, which is useful if your goal is graduate school in a primary discipline). </p>

<p>I’ve emailed one of their reps, who was extremely responsive and kind. I’m waiting to learn more (go to their website and you’ll find the ‘rep’ for your area, and likely get all your questions answered very quickly too).</p>

<p>Incredibly, stunningly friendly and warm website of any college I’ve ever seen, large or small. For what that’s worth :slight_smile: </p>

<p>10% of student body is international, only 1/3 of students from the province, so pretty good diversity, given it’s size and location.</p>

<p>The Atlantic provinces are full of such friendly and down to earth people. I think my D would love the region. </p>

<p>Cons as I see it:</p>

<p>What’s the catch? It sounds too easy to get into and I wonder what that means in terms of the degree of challenge and quality of education. For example, SATs are not required for American students, Canadians can get accepted with an 80% average in their 11th grade academic courses (and so can get the equivalent of Early Acceptance in Sept of their 12th year!). And if that’s not all, the rep told me one qualifies for a scholarship if they have an 80% or higher average in their top 5 academic subjects in 12th grade). Good safety, if nothing more!</p>

<p>I’ve heard- anecdotally somewhere- that they have a low retention rate. I’m trying to find data on that. </p>

<p>It’s not well known nor a research focused school and given my D’s interest, I wonder about the quality of options for work or graduate work if she so chooses (being an academic, I know there are HUGE differences in graduate schools and career options that emerge from that). If D gets serious about attending later on, I’d interview faculty in the dept she’s interested in to get specifics about research opportunities and where they place their graduates (in terms of going onto graduate school). That would answer my biggest concern. </p>

<p>I’d not be worried about lecture vs. seminar too much-- what matters is class size (as the actual format will usually be up to the prof). Even US LACs have larger intro courses and smaller courses as you move up. Before you read too much into the words (and marketing!) of any schools, get the actually data on the subset you are interested in. Lots gets lost when averages are quoted and marketing people get their hands on it! (grr). You’ll be surprised how big some LAC classes can be; and likewise how small and seminar-y the classes can be in some public Canadian schools. </p>

<p>I would email the rep for your region, and ask for specifics about class sizes in the major(s) or degree you are interested in and also email faculty in supposedly faculty-involved schools to ask what their classes are like and the format of their classes (and if they don’t respond, that tells you something too, doesn’t it?). It’s only an email or phone call away and that kind of drilling down is usually valuable.</p>

<p>Sorry I can’t be more helpful.</p>

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<p>If you have any questions about any Canadian universities, feel free to give me a shout. I know quite a bit about the majority of them due to my year or so of extensive research.</p>

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<p>Starbright, thanks! It’s so hard to find anecdotal information on the lesser-known Canadian schools. I’m a Canadian citizen living in the U.S. (permanent resident), but I want to have a career in Canada if possible. However, my first priority is to get the best possible education, and for me that involves small classes (preferably <20 students) and an intimate residential community. In Canada, do you think it would be better to have a degree from Mt. Allison (ranked highly in McLean’s, if nothing else) or a mid-tier American LAC like Macalester?</p>

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<p>Tough questions Keilexandra and I don’t have a good answer. My opinion, subject to debate, is that everyday Canadians in the work world have not heard of most US LACs and so you may be disadvantaged if you want a career in Canada. </p>

<p>BTW, the freshman retention rate at Mt. Allison is 85-90% (I heard back from the rep). </p>

<p>I’d not put all your eggs into the class size basket. Go deeper. There are pedagogical constraints and impacts of having say 100 students vs 50 students vs 10 students, but the difference between having say 30 students and 17 students is not so important. There are things I can do with 30 I can’t do with 17 (e.g. particular group exercises for example; cases run better with 30 than 17 and so on). I also have never felt I could impart more or better knowledge or have better class discussions when my class is 5 or 10 students, than when it’s 25. </p>

<p>Quality of teaching, quality of pedagogical approach (fitting well with the learning goals and students), quality of students in class with you, and having faculty that greatly respect, care about, personally know and are involved with students is very valuable. Do faculty know their students names? Do they have an open door policy? Is feedback given promptly? Will faculty meet with students to help them with course work? Do students meet professors outside of class to talk ideas or ask about career issues? (All these kinds of specific things can be found in the National Survey of Student Engagement). Far more than size per se.</p>

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<p>Op may i ask what highschool your son goes to? 'Cause i may be in the same highschool as him</p>

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<p>I am a Canadian high school student looking at some American schools in addition to U Toronto, UBC, and so on. </p>

<p>When one considers the difference in price, even after the financial aid given by American schools, the one overriding justification for going south that I can find is that you are looking for a unique educational experience that simply doesn’t exist here. Try as you might, there really isn’t a Canadian equivalent to the elite New England LAC (Amherst, Williams, Bowdoin,…). There is no Canadian equivalent of St. John’s College, which is a Great Books school. There is no Canadian equivalent of MIT/Caltech or Harvey Mudd College - Waterloo may be excellent, but simply lacks the intensity of the elite American Tech School. There is no Canadian school that approaches the intellectualism of U Chicago or Swarthmore or Reed. There is no Canadian school that has the experimental culture of New School or Pitzer or Hampshire. There is certainly no Canadian school directed at the profoundly gifted student like Simon’s Rock is. </p>

<p>By and large, Canadian schools are analogous to large public American institutions. There really isn’t a good reason to go to Berkeley or U Michigan or U Illinois when U Toronto is less than a quarter of the cost and will offer the same style and quality of education. But if you are looking for something other than that type of school, you will have good reason to consider an American institution.</p>

<p>To the OP, your son sounds like he might be a good fit for [Reed</a> College](<a href=“http://web.reed.edu/]Reed”>http://web.reed.edu/) , a small school that has truly word-class hard science departments but likes the sort of student that reads voluminously and is interested in lots of things, has a somewhat quirky sense of humour, is quite independent-spirited, and is intensely intellectual. The workload, from what I hear from several students, is very intense and quite substantial, but enjoyable. They are quite kind to Canadians with respect to financial aid, although they have a high sticker price. He may also be a good fit for places like Carleton College in Minnesota or the University of Chicago. </p>

<p>Anyhow, good luck on your son’s college search! Remember that wherever your son goes, he can still get a good education.</p>

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<p>^ Any comments on how Mt. Allison compares to the elite New England LAC?</p>

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<p>^Well, as starbright mentioned, Mount Allison will throw money at you if you have more than an 80% average, which would be… around a 3.4 GPA, approximately?</p>

<p>Although it’s hard to compare data across countries, a school like Williams, for example, has a middle SAT band of 660-760 for each subject for admitted students. (A 700 places you in the top 3% of test takers.) Nearly 90% of the students admitted are in the top 10% of their graduating class. However, the numbers for people who apply and are rejected are almost exactly the same! Essentially, Williams has thousands of incredibly brilliant applicants applying for around 500 spaces, so the people who are accepted are selected because they will form a balanced Williams community, with many different (though brilliant) types of people with different strengths.</p>

<p>In many Canadian high schools, an 80% average shows that you at least care about school a little bit, and may or may not be somewhat above average intellectually. Students who aren’t passionate about learning, quite driven, and talented in a number of outside activities, are very rarely accepted to schools like Williams.</p>

<p>Essentially, Mount Allison would be very similar to an elite New England LAC were the school to engage in the sort of community engineering from within an extremely talented applicant pool that New England LACs engage in. It would create a very different school culture from their present admissions patterns, which are closer to ‘come if you want to and aren’t experiencing significant academic difficulties.’ Although I can’t really comment on the quality of instruction at Mount Allison, the students at MA will be quite different people from the students at an Amherst or Williams or Middlebury.</p>

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<p>Possibly true. But given 70% of their student body goes onto graduate school, law or medicine, I am not so sure. Having taught at an Ivy, a State and now a major Canadian university, and being in the industry for 20 years, I know these differences are also highly exaggerated much of the time. Granted, taking the <em>top</em> LAC as a comparison point makes it work perhaps…but taking a mid-road LAC and well…Marketing to justify selectivity, rankings, which beget a repeat of the cycle. Before Popes book, there were lots of obscure LACs…then they hit the radar school, selectivity went way up, rankings went way up…(Reed for example went from 70% acceptance to 20%…and basically they same school they were before.</p>

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<p>Sure. Mount Allison is fairly analogous to a mid-road American LAC. It is not analogous to the <em>best</em> American LACs.</p>

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<p>And as for Reed, it doesn’t have much in common with a mid-road LAC or somewhere like Mount Allison aside from class size and intimacy of environment. It’s an example of an unusual school that doesn’t really have a Canadian counterpart.</p>

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<p>You misunderstood the point I was attempting to make. The point being that much of what you (and the rest of the future consumers of higher education) currently believe is too based on rankings and selectivity, which are generated from marketing, not necessarily worthwhile differences. It’s a consumer product like any other. </p>

<p>Every school in Pope’s book had relatively low selectivity but once they became known through his book and their tours, they saw a leap in their selectivity numbers and USNWR rankings, even though the schools themselves did not have to change. They were good then, they are good now (I only chose Reed only because I knew offhand the particular stats). </p>

<p>These across the board dramatic changes in selectivity illustrates how much this industry is about marketing/numbers/rankings rather than actual differences in educational experience. The industry wants to believe those differences are bigger than they are. But be assured, there are plenty of schools that never made his book that are easily as good.</p>

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<p>^ Alright. I understand what you’re saying. I certainly agree that rankings like USNWR are virtually useless, even harmful - for example, many schools looking to inflate their ranking on USNWR will reject students that will likely not attend even if they are well-qualified, as part of the USNWR formula measures what percent of accepted students enroll.</p>

<p>However, part of the value of education comes from the other students one will be studying with. Highly selective schools that choose from a very talented pool are able to create a better student body by several measurements, the most obvious of which is the average SAT score of the incoming class (which has approximately a 0.6 correlation with academic success in college). This ability on the part of the school to shape the student body makes highly selective schools unique, even if the quality of instruction would remain the same if the number of applications suddenly dropped 50%. </p>

<p>But the point that I was trying to make earlier is that, while Canadian schools certainly offer an excellent education, there are a number of American institutions that are very, very different from anything that we have in Canada, and a desire to attend one of these institutions can make education in the United States worthwhile. The example of Williams was probably a poor choice. Let’s try another.</p>

<p>Harvey Mudd College is a science/engineering college of 750 students in California. Its students regularly do extraordinarily well on the Putnam math competition, they require that all students study relativistic quantum mechanics and take two years of differential equations, they have a year of calculus as an entrance requirement. All students must produce a thesis or perform a year of research in order to graduate. The philosophy of the school, stating that technology must be used within the context of a broader understanding of society, forces students to take the equivalent of a minor in a humanities subject. 25% of graduates go on to earn PhDs - for some faculties, this number is closer to 50%. Students frequently graduate with patents or published research to their name. The school has incredible job placement and average starting salaries are higher than Harvard’s, for the minority of students that do not continue on to graduate school. To my knowledge, there is no program in Canada that approaches the rigour and intensity of a Harvey Mudd education (although U Toronto’s Engineering Science program is similar in some respects), and if there is, I would certainly love to know about it!</p>

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<p>I’m not as qualified as some of the above posters, but I’ll give this my take.</p>

<p>I’m an american citizen who moved here since I was four, so educated basically Canadian style, although I have taken quite a few university summer camps in the states since grade 10.</p>

<p>IMO, you will fit in anywhere you want to fit in; it’s up to you to make the effort to try and make friends and enjoy your campus and the lifestyle that goes along with it. There really is no difference being in Vancouver or Seattle. </p>

<p>As for education quality, I differ from most of the posters here; breathing UT or UBC even western ontario, in the same sentence as Georgetown, UMich, UCBerkeley, Pomona, CMC, should be a crime. American high schools provide much more help and way more AP classes than Canadian high schools do, and if that’s an indicator, then maybe the universities take on the same light. Consider that American universities give candidates a full consdieration of all their abilities: ec’s, academic, athletic, essay. Whereas UBC would just ask you for a transcrip and your in based on average percentage of your marks. Their reputations, their reknown, and the alumni connection is no where near that of the second rate US colleges. I mean given a choice between UCLA and UBC, I would take UCLA, since it’s much easier to find a job with UCLA on my resume than UBC. And if any of my counselors are reading this, boy are they going to mess up my application.</p>

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<p>I absolutely disagree with the above. </p>

<p>The AP thing is just another industry! The hype hype hype of the American college system, has created another industry with College Board, SATs and APs. Schools are more readily available to Canadian students (the differences between them are not nearly as great), and American culture likes to rank everything. </p>

<p>I concur there are a lot of American schools better than the best Canadian schools. The US has something like 4000 from which to choose. But I absolutely assure you that just because you have heard of an American school in movies, and USNWR, does not in anyway mean it offers a better education that the top Canadian ones. Not by a long shot. Listen, I know from where I speak on this. </p>

<p>I have had so many students over the years who have gone to great graduate programs, professional programs and jobs in the US from my Canadian uni which costed, oh about 5k a year. Lots and lots and lots. If you can get into one of the elite LACs or Harvard, I say go for it. But UMichigan? UCLA (with the exception of a few specialized programs)? No way. I absolutely don’t get why your parents would spend $50k a year when they could easily invest that in your education after undergrad.</p>

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<p>Harvey Mudd is a great school, and it’s a good example for your argument. Would be a no-brainer for me if the cost was the same. Do you have to pay back the $200,000 differential or is it free for you? </p>

<p>And read all this literature critically. It’s an engineering school so should not be a surprise it pays more than Harvard (with no pesky arts majors bringing down the mean!). And those grad student stats are not noteworthy. </p>

<p>And anyone who can get in and succeed at HM would be able, with a bit of initiative, be outstanding and have tons of opportunities and a great experience at a lot of great engineering or math programs in Canada. No question about it. As but one example, any undergrad can start doing research (in either country), all they have to do is seek it out.</p>

<p>Just keep remember you are reading advertising. Not that it isn’t true (even great products have to be marketed), but with all this university lit., be as skeptical as anything else you read that is written to sell you something. </p>

<p>.</p>

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<p>^ The key you are missing, I think, is fit. I could succeed perfectly well in a large university lecture, but I would much PREFER a small LAC seminar classroom. With a few exceptions, Canadian universities simply cannot offer that kind of environment from year 1 for the majority of classes. (Special interdisciplinary first-year programs don’t count, as they’re similar to U.S. honors programs but not widespread in the curriculum.)</p>

<p>For someone who wants a strong technical education but ALSO an LAC-style education (with access to the many, many humanities/social science courses of the Claremont Consortium), Harvey Mudd is essentially his/her only choice on this continent. It’s not about success–smart people can succeed in a variety of environments–but comfort and fit. Just because I can succeed somewhere, doesn’t mean I would LIKE it.</p>