So. This is the last blog of the academic year. Service resumes Tuesday, 2 September. It’s been a long year. I’m pretty tired. How about you? This was the year it all kind of came crashing down: not just here in Canda, but everywhere else too. It’s too long to go through and my more faithful readers already know the story. It’s not just in Canada. In France, Australia, and the UK, we saw institutions having similar problems: all these
What’s been going on around the world since the end of March, you ask? Well, unsurprisingly, the biggest stories have come from the United States. There are in effect four fronts to the Trump administration’s attacks on the world of higher education. First of all, the government’s new budget is going to reduce student eligibility for student loans and grants, meaning there will be less opportunity available to American students. Second, the budget also proposes to radically slash the budgets of the
Morning everyone. The days are getting long, so that means it’s getting close to the time when I need to wrap up this blog for the (northern hemisphere) summer. And that, in turn, means book report time, where I round up everything I’ve read on higher education for the past six months. (If you’re looking for non-higher education recommendations: Terry David Martin’s The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union 1923-1939 will re-wire your thinking about what the early
One of the most tiresome debates in post-secondary education is about whether or not students emerge from their studies “job ready”. To which the answer, of course, is that for the most part they do not. Education – including vocational education – is meant to prepare you for a long career rather than an immediate job. Training for specific jobs? That’s usually a job for companies themselves, and the fact that they underinvest in this area – notably by cutting
There is no aspect of university autonomy that is more fundamental – in the British Commonwealth at least — than the right of each institution to select which students it chooses to admit. Along with financial autonomy, staffing autonomy, and financial autonomy (that last one being under increasing pressure these days), the right of institutions to choose which students to teach is fundamental to the Canadian higher education system. At no time in Canadian history has a government ever tried
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