An Australian colleague of mine once suggested to me that I built my career primarily on filling in the holes in Statistics Canada’s severely limited PSE stats. I don’t think this is actually true, but it probably is fair to say that some of the breaks in my career have involved explaining Canadian PSE to the rest of the world in terms they can understand. Partly, that involves being able to describe Canada as a single system of education (because really, absolutely no one cares that we actually have ten different systems; we are boring enough as it is without having to explain Quebec 1864 and provincial differences in governance and funding and all the other minutiae we like to obsess over – just do what Americans and Germans and Swiss do when they talk about their systems and just gloss over the differences). But also, it’s about understanding what an outlier we are internationally in so many different areas.

Here’s a few things that stand out about Canada:

No Matriculation/Entrance Exams. Most countries in the world test their kids on curriculum at the end of grade 12; some have separate university exams, a few (Sweden, the US), give kids psychometric exams like the SAT. Canada is one of the very few countries which does exactly none of that (OK, Alberta has a matriculation exam but its effect on university entrance is marginal). Combine this with a relatively soft streaming system in secondary schools (no selection at age 11-12 as in much of central Europe), and you get very open access to universities.

A Massive College System. No country in the world has as many graduates of non-university post-secondary education as we do. And yes, that’s partly due to the peculiarity of the Quebec CEGEP system (where we hand out post-secondary credentials for what many other countries would call upper secondary education), but it’s also due in large part to the way that a group of institutions that were mainly trade/voc in orientation 40 years ago have transformed themselves into major purveyors of professional education in areas which in much of continental Europe would be called “applied universities”.

Our Apprenticeship System is Deeply Weird: Most of the rest of the world thinks of apprenticeships as being part of (or at least closer to) the secondary school system – something for teenagers. We think of it mostly as something for people in their mid-20s. The rest of the world makes sure to have a constant mix throughout the week of work and instruction. Our apprentices for the most part work straight for 40 weeks (when work is available) and then go into the classroom for 12 weeks straight. Why do we use this “block” system? Nobody has ever given me a good answer to this question though I suspect it’s because tight-wad provinces back in the day asked for federal support and the only way the feds could figure out how to do it was to use EI, which requires individuals to be “out of work”.

Big Research Universities are the Norm. There are other countries which have a lot of research universities. There are very few other countries – the Netherlands and Switzerland are the only two that come to mind – where over half of all undergraduates are educated in research universities. This has some odd consequences. The first is that the average professorial teaching load is lighter in Canada than almost anywhere else because profs at research universities aren’t expected to teach to the same degree as elsewhere. In theory, that could make our system very expensive to run – but what partially offsets this is that because research universities are big universities, we have a lot of economies of scale. Doesn’t mean we don’t have to still resort to using a lot of sessionals to balance the books, but it helps nonetheless.

Low Status Anxiety. In most countries, “top” universities are small. You could fit the entire Ivy League inside U of T, for instance. But precisely because our “top” universities are so massive, it’s not that hard for people to get in. Therefore, our culture lacks the status anxiety (and the attendant media frenzy that preys upon it) that the English have about getting their kids into Oxbridge, or the Chinese have about Beida/Tsinghua. By and large, parents think most institutions are “pretty good”. This completely changes the nature of public discourse around institutions.

A Ton of Money. Yes, yes, everyone is underfunded. But in comparison to the rest of the world, Canadian institutions get a lot of money from government grants, and they also get a lot of money from students (though a high proportion of this is also government-subsidized). Result: among the highest per-student expenditures on post-secondary education in the whole world.

An Aversion to System Planning. Canadians like to just get on with doing things. Taking time to plan? To co-ordinate? To, maybe, develop systemic approaches to things in which different institutions play different assigned roles? Forget it. Might upset people. Un-Canadian. Better to keep plugging along and hope for the best. The result is a system where institutions have a high degree of autonomy but where the system as a whole does not act in a particularly efficient way. Now because we spend so much money, we can still come in the top third of most measures of system output (research, access, etc) despite the lack of planning. We could do a heck of a lot better for the same amount of money if we didn’t have this aversion, but this is the Canadian way.

With the exception of the apprenticeship system, no single one of these things marks Canada out as being unique. The Koreans have a big college system, the Norwegians have no entrance exams, the Dutch are big on research universities, etc. But if you put all those things in combination you have a system which is really like no other. We’re really different.

And it’s worth keeping that in mind when thinking about how policies are developed and implemented elsewhere: other systems’ realities are fundamentally different from our own. Don’t assume that what works here would work elsewhere – or vice-versa. Context matters.