The Ontario minister for training, colleges, and universities visited Carleton on Feb. 3 to tour new research facilities and learn more about the university.
Minister Reza Moridi toured Carleton’s facilities, including the flight simulators in the Visualization and Simulation building.
Moridi said the university is on the cutting edge of many fields and is on par with universities nationally and internationally.
“I’m very impressed with the various things that are at Carleton. One is accessibility, in terms of accessibility to different students and staff,” Moridi said. “I think this is one of the most accessible institutions in Ontario, far as I can see.”
Moridi also said the university has done an excellent job of specializing itself, making it a leader in the sciences and engineering.
“Also the various programs here, they are leaders in our province of Ontario, and I believe in the world as well,” Moridi said, and listed programs such as aerospace engineering, journalism, and physics.
Overall, Moridi said universities have been doing well, but there is always room to improve helping students, something Moridi has been advocating for in recent years.
The Ontario government made a controversial decision last summer to make universities pick “specializations” to create differentiation between schools and programs.
“Every university cannot specialize in every discipline, that is a huge ambition. So each university has its own specific strong areas,” he said.
Specialization does not necessarily limit student choice, Moridi said.
“Every university has its own areas of strength, so we want to focus on their area of strength, and students have the option to choose their universities as they want,” he said. “You funnel resources to where you really want to rather than duplicating the same thing.”
Moridi said a major goal was to focus on increasing the quality of post-secondary education through differentiation and funding.
“In the past twelve years since the Ontario Liberal Party came to office, we have increased enrolment quite significantly, by 40 per cent,” Moridi said. “We want to strengthen the quality of education, the quality of knowledge creation, as well as entrepreneurship.”
The minister also spoke about tuition, noting university should always be about a student’s ability to learn.
“We made education more accessible for students coming from low and middle-income families,” Moridi said. “We’re saying that post-secondary education is based on your ability to learn, not your ability to pay.”
He added that, going forward, Ontario universities need to return to focusing on the quality of education students are receiving.
“Universities always grow, always become bigger and bigger, in terms of size and in terms of quality,” he said. “That is the nature of universities, but again, I think the time is ripe for us in Ontario to pay more attention to the quality.”
