THUNDER BAY – Confederation College partnered with Northern Policy Institute (NPI), to see how Confederation College campuses located in Northwestern Ontario contribute to social progress of the communities in which they are located.
“This project as conceived was fairly straightforward: let’s measure the impact that Confederation College has on social progress in Northwestern Ontario”, said author of 50 Years of Progress, Anthony Noga.
The author identified 26 commonly used indicators of social progress under four main dimensions: Human Capital, Economy, Individual Prosperity, Community Vitality. The indicators assessed time-series data over a twenty-year period across the eight communities in the region that host a campus, as well as three counterfactual communities – one from each census division – that could have hosted a campus. These results were tested against two more locations in Northwestern Ontario that do not host a campus, as well as a pair of test cases in the Northeast.
The report demonstrates that “those communities that have a stronger relationship to the college tend to have more human capital, as evidenced through their better education and employment statistics, they have more diverse and resilient economies, they enjoy more individual prosperity as evidenced by better income, poverty and housing affordability statistics, and the communities have greater vitality through more stable population sizes, better voter turnout in federal elections, and crime statistics.”
The college can draw upon these results “to build on its strengths and achieve its vision under the Strategic Mandate Agreement. At the same time, this report contributes to the burgeoning literature on social progress and grants a better sense of how people in Northwestern Ontario are truly doing.”
50 Years of Progress: Measuring Confederation College’s Impact on Social Progress in Northwestern Ontario, was delivered to the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities. To read, click here : https://www.northernpolicy.ca/confederation-college
