The men's rugby team were joined by several athletes from other Warrior teams to spend three hours recently packing gifts for Operation Christmas Child. "Members of the community, including a lot of church groups and schools, donate shoeboxes full of presents," explains field hockey player Jess Lawson, who helped organize the event on behalf of the Interuniversity Council. "At the processing plant, we inspected the boxes for harmful presents or things that would not pass the customs inspection. Then we packaged the boxes that would be delivered to the children. The boxes get distributed to over 130 countries around the world, but this year they are making an effort to send the largest portion to children in Haiti after this year's horrible natural disaster. Everyone had a lot of fun, and the three hours we were volunteering seemed to fly by."

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Counting students and weighing grants

A hundred pages of numbers and graphs, from “average OSAP per FTE student” (highest in math, lowest in engineering) to “total library holdings in millions”, add up to a statistical picture of the university and where it stands relative to other big institutions.

It’s the annual “Performance Indicators” document, this year published primarily online, with a paper summary available and a few full printed copies produced for reference use.

Student representative Ian Kasper called it “an awesome report” when it was brought up for discussion at the November meeting of the university senate. His particular interest was enrolment growth, and he pointed out that the 2009-10 undergraduate level of 24,598 “full-time equivalent” students is already past the 24,000 that was supposed to be the Sixth Decade goal for 2017.

The performance indicators document shows undergrad and graduate enrolment on the same chart, juxtaposing those 24,598 undergrads with 3,561 FTE graduate students last academic year. That means there’s a way to go if Waterloo is to reach another Sixth Decade goal: having grad students make up 20 per cent of the total enrolment. Last year it was 12.6 per cent.

The indicators report, prepared by the office of institutional analysis and planning, is divided into nine sections, dealing with undergraduate studies, graduate studies, research, faculty, staff, co-operative education, resources, fundraising, and the library. In a presentation to the senate meeting, Mary Jane Jennings, director of the IAP office, noted that the indicators are now in their seventh year, though this is the first one since she took on the director’s post a few months ago.

“Our goal,” she said, “is to make sure the indicators are relevant for Senate and Board of Governors — but not everything we need to know is in the report.”

She mentioned a few highlights, such as figures suggesting that “the quality of high school graduates is not eroding,” with the average marks of entering students rising from 2007 to 2008 and again to 2009. One chart in the report shows what percentage of students enter each of Ontario’s universities with marks over 90, the so-called “Ontario Scholars”; Waterloo, as always, ranks second in the province, behind Queen’s.

Page 30 of the report includes a pie chart showing where Waterloo’s first-year students come from: 13 per cent from Kitchener-Waterloo, 10 from Toronto, 22 from other parts of the Greater Toronto Area, 35 from the rest of Ontario, 6 from the rest of Canada, and 13 from other countries.

Those international students come primarily from Asia, the same page reveals, and Jennings told the senate meeting that just four countries account for 70 per cent of the international population: in order, they are China, South Korea, Pakistan and India. (Later in the report is similar data for graduate students; the leading countries sending grads to Waterloo are China, Iran and Saudi Arabia.)

While she was reporting on the performance indicators, she also gave senate a few words about an issue that isn’t included in the report, saying there had been a request for data on the qualifications of everybody teaching 100-level (first-year) courses. Good data is hard to assemble, since the instructor for 42 per cent of such courses is listed as “TBA” — “very popular instructor,” she quipped. Where her office has been able to chase down more specific information, “we know 50 per cent of 100-level courses are taught by lecturers” and the other half by continuing faculty.

Incomplete, unreliable or missing data is a common problem in assembling the information, Jennings and other officials repeated in the course of the senate discussion. In calculations of student-faculty ratios, for instance, “universities are playing games with the denominators,” said engineering dean Adel Sedra. “We should be pushing for a standard — the last one added visitors, and adjuncts, and passers-by.”

“It’s only taken us 13 years,” said Jennings, for Canada’s top universities, the so-called G13, “to come to an agreement of definition for full-time faculty.” The performance indicators report shows a chart of ratios based on that definition: Waterloo has the third-highest figure — 27.3 students per faculty member in 2008-09 — with Toronto the highest at 32.1 and McGill the lowest at 16.8.

A few other findings extracted from the performance indicators report:

• Waterloo granted 1,284 BA degrees in 2009, as well as 795 BSc degrees from various faculties, 733 BASc degrees from engineering, 632 BMath, and smaller numbers of eight other undergraduate degrees. A total of 1,041 master’s degrees and 217 PhDs were also awarded.

• “Tri-council” research funding varies dramatically from one faculty to another — $91,000 per professor in science last year, $64,000 in engineering, $17,000 in arts. (The senate meeting included some discussion of what’s the right way to measure research productivity, not just in dollars but in results such as publications and citations. “No single metric” is sufficient, said vice-president, university research, George Dixon.)

• Fifteen per cent of faculty members, and 11 per cent of staff, are over age 60.

• The “weighted average age of Waterloo’s buildings is 35.4 years —  figure higher than for Western, Queen’s or Laurier, though lower than numbers for Guelph and Toronto.

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A few other notes as exams continue

The university’s 2010 United Way campaign "has wrapped up on a high note," says Marina Selioukova from the United Way office on the third floor of the Davis Centre. "With the help of the many dedicated volunteers, this year’s campaign managed to surpass the $200,000 goal, raising a total of $208,343.97 through personal donations and special events. To encourage the campus community to contribute to this year’s campaign, we held a special prize draw for our donors. Five names were selected randomly from among our new and returning donors for the prize of breakfast with the President. The five winners are Robert Le Roy (Chemistry), Catherine Mitchell (UW Police), Frank Preston (Psychology), Linda Snyder (Renison University College) and Theophanis Stratopoulos (School of Accounting & Finance). Reaching our goal would not have been possible without the many volunteers involved in the campaign. The co-chairs would like to take this opportunity to say thank you to each and every volunteer for their contribution to a very successful campaign, and a big thank you to all of the donors for their gifts to the United Way."

Fall term exams are still in progress, which implies stress and stress-relievers (I hear there was a good-sized snowball fight at Mackenzie King Village on Monday) as well as 24-hour service in the Davis Centre library and at Tim Hortons in the Student Life Centre. It also means some extra bus service, says a memo from the scheduler at Grand River Transit: "For the exam period we are providing extra trips on routes that serve the university, mostly for the evening exams. We will likely have these trips uploaded into our EasyGO text/phone system and web site Trip Planner later this week," and meanwhile the details are available on the GRT web site. "It is also important to note that starting December 20, GRT starts its Christmas schedule with reduced service on many routes. I will be working on providing some extra trips around the exam times for December 20-22."

Computer science student Paul Butler (who, no coincidence, spent the fall term at the VeloCity incubator residence) hit the worldwide news this week. Butler is nearing the end of a co-op work term at Facebook, and "while his code was compiling", did a little playing with some data from the half-billion-member social network. The result: a map (right) that provides a visualization of global friendships — filaments connecting the home cities of pairs of Facebook "friends". Butler and his map have been featured in media from PC Magazine to the Guardian. Says one tech web site: "Butler took a sampling of about ten million pairs of friends from Facebook's data warehouse Apache Hive and began by combining that data with each user's current city, summing the number of friends between each pair of cities. That data was then merged with the longitude and latitude of each city. As Butler explored the data in open-source statistics environment, he pared it down and down and moved it around and found something fabulous . . . a finely detailed map of the world made real not by the traditional coasts, rivers, and political borders, but by real human relationships."

Carmen Jaray, who manages the university's mailroom in East Campus Hall, send this seasonal note: "Because it’s Christmas time, we have seen a lot of red envelopes coming through for postage. The meter impression (postage) is in red ink. The postage is not very visible on red envelopes. In the Canada Post Postal Guide under 'Paying for your mailing' section 2.2 it states: 'Postage meter impressions must be legible (capable of being read by Canada Post personnel and mail processing equipment).' When using red envelopes the sender takes the chance that the envelopes will be returned to them. It would be better to use green or any other colour where the meter impression will be visible."

This week's Positions Available list, seen at right, includes the job of director for the Centre for Teaching Excellence, an agency that's responsible for Waterloo's teaching awards, the Certificate in University Teaching program, workshops and coaching for faculty, the Teaching-Based Research Group, guiding departments through the "learning objectives" process, and a good deal more. CTE was previously headed by a faculty member, Cathy Schryer of English language and literature, who left Waterloo a year and a half ago. Since July 1, 2009, associate director Donna Ellis has been serving as interim director. The unit reports to the associate vice-president (academic), who these days is the same person as the provost, Geoff McBoyle.

CAR

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