Accessibility to Ontario Universities.

Accessibility to a college education in Ontario, Canada, was assessed by studying the pattern of acceptances and rejections of various choices made by unregistered college applicants. Study concerns included: total offers to programs of choice from any college and from an Ontario college only; offers by institution type and program type for first three choices made; and main reasons why respondents did not attend college. Findings include the following: about 25 percent of the respondents did not receive any offers to a program of their choice from an Ontario university; about 15 percent did not receive any offers from an Ontario university; respondents choosing Ontario university programs in the applied sciences and the arts had the highest acceptance rates; respondents choosing programs in the applied health field had the lowest acceptance rate; just over 25 percent of the respondents did not attend any postsecondary institution in 1983; respondents who did not receive any offers to a program of their choice from an Ontario university were overrepresented in their choice of highly competitive programs such as engineering and nursing; and almost half of the respondents applied to Ontario universities only. Appended are study questionnaires, information on the research design, and a response coding manual. (SW)