Today, we launch the first project of the Student Affairs Group, the Canadian Student Unions Index. It analyzes and ranks student unions in Canada based on their performance in supporting students through services, representing their interests within university governance and beyond, and running a political economy of high-functioning extracurricular activities.
Why student unions?
Student unions are unique entities. While they are similar to labour unions in that they protect the rights and working conditions of their members, students are more than just workers. Student unions thus look after the totality of the student experience beyond students’ labour. Student unions are also similar to membership organizations in that they unite people with a common purpose and work towards achieving shared goals. But student unions differ from membership organizations in that membership is typically automatic based on enrollment status and they must balance representing a constantly changing demographic with diverse and sometimes conflicting priorities.
We believe that student unions should be primarily understood as democratic governing bodies. They hold elections, collect taxes, enact policies, have their own intra-organizational political partisanships, and maintain a civil service that is supposed to be neutral to such partisan factions. Student unions are thus an important part of the democratic project. Their autonomy needs to be protected and their governance structures should embody the kinds of good governance we want to see in the world.
Student unions are versatile. They provide services, represent students’ interests, and run the extracurricular lives of their campuses. These three areas of activity require different sets of skills from student leaders, and excelling in all at the same time is challenging for leaders elected to more short-term positions than roles in municipal, provincial, or federal politics.
Student unions are in a perpetual state of flux. Student leaders often get elected for one-year mandates, and generations of the student body typically span 4-5 years, the average time it takes to complete a degree. These frequent changes of leadership pose substantial challenges for long-term planning and the development of institutional knowledge.
All of the aforementioned factors contribute to the difficulty of evaluating and helping student unions improve. We seek to help students alleviate this difficulty so they have the information and resources they need to foster success in their student unions. Our first step in this direction is the creation of the pilot version of a service that would gather data on the student unions’ performance, showcase achievements, and suggest improvements.
Why the Canadian Student Unions Index?
The Canadian Student Unions Index begins at a time of uncertainty for Canadian student unions. In the climate of budget cuts, heightened political tensions, and the decline of participation in student politics, student unions do not have many allies. Recent years have seen attempts to undermine student union autonomy.
We created the Index to show that Canadian student unions are an impactful benefit to education and they are getting better over time. The infographic below illustrates our approach.
Why this particular methodology and the ranking format?
We built the Index’s methodology based on our ideas of a model student union, drawing from our lived experience and published academic research. The pilot analysis of undergraduate student unions at U15 universities tests this methodology. We would like to gather feedback from student leaders, academics, and student affairs practitioners on the viability of the criteria and the attribution of particular scores, as well as on the need to expand or shrink the scoring rubrics. This Index is not the final product, but a starting point based on publicly available data to help the ongoing conversations about student democracy.
Let’s stay in touch
You can share your feedback with us by email at contact@studentaffairsgroup.com. We will evaluate the findings over the course of the next months and we will decide on the course of this project. Meanwhile, we will be regularly publishing posts in this newsletter with insights, analysis, and opinions on student affairs in Canada and around the world. Stay tuned!
The featured image is designed by Freepik.
