Can you believe that Ontario doesn’t have CEGEP yet?
For those who don’t know, allow me to be condescending for a moment about something I was unaware of until last year: CEGEP (Collège d’enseignement général et professionnel) is Quebec’s enforced college system.
Basically, students from the province enter university with two years of post-secondary experience that we don’t get in Ontario. I feel like the kid who just found out all his friends get money when they lose a tooth.
“CEGEP lets you figure out your future cheaply.”
I’m well aware that mass overhauls of education, healthcare, and everything else are tricky business. I’m also quite familiar with the questions many people have about Quebec’s education system on the whole. It does work, however. The benefits are twofold.
For one, every year thousands of university students pay Ontario millions of dollars in tuition just to figure out what they maybe want to do at some point if they don’t want to not do it. A lot of these people end up dropping out in a year, or three, after their fortunes have been drained discovering they don’t want to be a psycho-para-engineer.
CEGEP lets you figure out your future cheaply. The programs are usually two years long and are affordable – two reasons it really doesn’t matter if you screwed up choosing your major. In fact, many CEGEP students will focus in one stream, and discover their future university major in some mandatory other class on the side.
We enter university at 17 or 18 in Ontario. In Quebec, high school ends a year earlier, but the extra year of schooling that CEGEP provides means they start university around 19. Those couple years at the end of our teenagehood are pretty formative. It doesn’t matter what you do with that time – by the laws of science, you’re going to grow up.
Personally, I think that giving yourself a year or two to mature before entering university can help relieve the stresses of adapting to a new environment, and reduce social anxieties that many first-years have.
For this reason, I’ve always encouraged taking a year off between high school and university, but a CEGEP equivalent would be even better, offering something productive for us to do with that time and a means to adjust more smoothly into higher education.
Ontario already offers the choice to pursue college, but it’s more of an opposing option to university than a companion. With a CEGEP-like program in place, many people will find a passion that they otherwise wouldn’t have known they thirsted.
So do I think that this little piece is actually going to cause the Ontario government to reform their entire education system, build dozens of new institutions, and hire thousands of new professors? I’m 60 per cent sure it won’t. But maybe this will help cultivate some sort of action.
If Ontario won’t initiate an equivalent program with the scope of Quebec’s, they can at least encourage other post-secondary endeavors that help bridge an oft-ignored leap in our young lives. Let’s make that big journey off to university really worth it when the time comes. We don’t all have the luxury to be uncertain.
Dustin Dyer
Contributor
