Regional differences in Canadian rural-urban participation rates in post-secondary education

This paper is part of a series of research papers solicited from some of the leading Canadian researchers in the field of post-secondary education; the researchers were asked to write about issues of access and persistence in post-secondary education in Canada. [...] The types of "systems" used for comparison in the regions identified in this analysis were: 1) a proliferation of PSE institutions in general and of universities in rural areas (as is found in the Atlantic region and Quebec); 2) formal articulation agreements between colleges and universities (as is found in Alberta and British Columbia); 3) the system in Quebec whereby the first years of PSE take [...] The participation of rural youth in PSE was also higher in the Atlantic region (73 percent) and Ontario (74 percent) than the remaining three regions (67 percent, 61 percent and 61 percent in the Prairies, Quebec and the West, respectively). [...] The coefficients of note are the interaction effects, highlighted in Table 5. Here, the only observed rural-urban difference (as measured by the regional interaction effect) was in the Prairies (relative to the omitted category, Quebec). [...] The odds of a rural young person in the Prairies compared to an urban youth in the Prairies participating in some PSE were higher than the comparable odds in Quebec when other factors, including the overall impact of region, were controlled.