When Gross Domestic Product goes up, the media and citizenry have been conditioned to shout hosannas. Yet in the backrooms somewhere, decision-makers could be looking at these same robust growth figures with concern, fearing the economy may be overheating and creating the conditions for higher inflation. At some point, if these signals become too alarming, central bankers will raise their interest rates and — presto! — your mortgage payment just went up. In this way, we use indicators of economic growth to generate a series of non-economic policies and outcomes.

Whether this is good economic policy or not has been debated for decades. What is rarely discussed outside academics circles, however, is whether these indicators of progress actually give us the right guidance to create the society we collectively want. The implications go far beyond mere economics or the arcana of economic measurement. Competing views of the world — each justified by how we measure progress — play a part in the real world of public policy and public choice.
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When the Strategic Counsel joined forces with UThink to use the Studentawards database to undertake the most comprehensive review ever conducted of Canadian University student’s attitudes to their educational experience, we assumed that we would find some significant differences (why, after all, set out to rank Universities, if this was not the starting premise?). Our assumption was that we would uncover great Universities, middling ones and some that failed to meet their constituent’s needs. In other words, we expected that the top-tiered Universities would be appreciated as such because they were beacons of excellence while the lower ranked Universities would do everything less well.

In some measure, this proved true. Students across the country rate their Universities in very different ways and are able to articulate their University experience in very precise ways.

But what was even more telling was that each of the 29 student body’s we interviewed had highly divergent and distinctive assessments of the school experience and as a result, every University in Canada appears to have their own divergent and distinctive personality.
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