York University Prof/Director of Institute for Social Research Paul Grayson Wins National Award for Research on University Student Experience at ėLearneds'

TORONTO, June 9, 1999 -- York University Professor and Director of the Institute for Social Research Paul Grayson has won the Canadian Society for the Study of Higher Education (CSSHE) Research Award for his unique chronicling of students at York University -- their composition, their experiences, their realities.

Grayson, who shares this honour with Prof. Rodney A. Clifton of the University of Manitoba, will receive the award Friday, June 11 during the 1999 Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities (formerly known as the Congress of the Learneds) which opens tomorrow at the University of Sherbrooke and runs until June 12. Award winners are chosen annually by a committee of leading researchers who receive nominations from the scholarly community. Given to practising scholars with an established reputation, the award is conferred on the basis of published research on Canadian postsecondary education, with particular emphasis given to work published in the past five years.

The Canadian Society for the Study of Higher Education, which created the Award to honour excellence in research on higher education, commended Grayson for his continued work on student life at York University, noting that his primary research publications deal with such subjects as the retention of students, academic achievement of first-generation students, and factors that affect student well-being.

Grayson, who received his undergraduate and graduate degrees during York University's early years before earning his PhD in Sociology from the University of Toronto in 1972, has continued to be widely published in academic journals while teaching and serving in administrative positions at York. Since 1991, he has directed the Institute for Social Research, which houses the largest university-based survey research unit in Canada.

He has turned his scholarship of late to an examination of higher education and specifically, student life experiences, which provides a rare portrait of the changing nature of the student experience in Canada today. For example, he has carried out inquiries into aspects of the university experience as they relate to gender, family income, and ethno-racial origin. His inquiries have also focused on the value added by the university experience to students' communication, analytical, personal, computational, and arithmetic skills. He has recently been working on a five-university study on how students finance their university education. Grayson has also researched and published widely in the areas of political sociology, the sociology of literature, the sociology of work and health, and the quality of life in Toronto and Montreal.

The Institute for Social Research (ISR) has thirty years of experience in social science, public opinion and policy research. ISR annually conducts between twenty and thirty research projects at the local, provincial and national levels in such areas as education, housing, gender issues, energy and the environment, health and medical services, politics, law, social interaction and other social issues. The Institute also carries out on-going studies of York students relevant to policy makers as well as academics in their roles as researchers, teachers and administrators. ISR bulletins and publications can be found at http://www.isr.yorku.ca/isr/index.asp

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For more information, please contact:

Sine MacKinnon
Senior Advisor, Media Relations
York University
(416) 736-2100, ext. 22087
email: sinem@yorku.ca

Garth Williams
Public Affairs Coordinator
Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada
(819) 821-7841
gwilliam@hssfc.ca
YU/070/99