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Category: Canada

Teaching Load Versus Workload

I often get into discussions that go like this: Me: Over time, the number of classes each professor teaches has gone down.  Places where people used to teach 3/2 (three classes one term, two the other) now teach 2/1.  Places where 4/3 or even 4/4 were common are now 3/2.   This has been one of the main things making higher education more expensive in Canada. Someone else (usually a prof): Yeah, but classes are so much larger now than they

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June 9, 2014 4 Comments

Articles of Faith

Further to Tuesday’s blog about STEM panics, I note a new report out from Canada 2020, a young-ish organization with pretensions to be the Liberals’ pet think tank called Skills and Higher Education in Canada: Towards Excellence and Equity.  Authored by the Conference Board’s Daniel Munro, it covers most of the ground you’d expect in a “touch-all-the-bases” report.  And while the section on equity is pretty good, when it comes to “excellence” this paper – like many before it – draws

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June 5, 2014 1 Comment

Valuing Foreign Degrees

There was an interesting Statscan paper out yesterday that made some fascinating observations about education, immigration, and human capital.  With the totally hip title, The Human Capital Model of Selection and the Economic Outcomes of Immigrants (authors: Picot, Hou and Qiu), it’s a good example both of what Statscan-type analyses do well, and do poorly. At one level, it’s a very good study.  It uses the Longitudinal Administrative Databank (Statscan’s coolest database – it’s a longitudinal 20% sample of all of the

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May 30, 2014 3 Comments

Tuition Fees and Inequality

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: it’s unfair that some people graduate with debt, and others don’t.  The ones that do tend to have started off poorer to begin with.  And so instead of being a means of social mobility, tuition ends up being a means of perpetuating it – the ones who start off poorer end up poorer.  That’s bad, and that’s why we should have no tuition.  Eliminate tuition and you eliminate inequality. Let’s take this

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May 26, 2014 2 Comments

New Data on Student Debt: the 2010 National Graduates Survey

The National Graduates Survey figures on debt for the class of 2010 were (quietly) released yesterday.  Unlike the employment data they released a few weeks ago, this data actually *is* comparable to results from previous surveys.  It is thus a good way to check on whether/how student debt is actually reaching “out of sight” levels. So, let’s start with some interprovincial comparisons. Average Government Student Loan Debt at Graduation, Borrowers Only, By Province and Type of Institution, Class of 2010  

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May 23, 2014 7 Comments
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One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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