Category: Canada

Early NGS Results: The Caveats

Yesterday, I showed you some charts on graduate outcomes indicating that the kids were – mostly – alright: employment steady, Full-time employment steady, graduate incomes steady, etc.  But there are three significant reasons to be cautious about over-interpreting these results. The first is that this year’s NGS was conducted differently from previous iterations.  In previous years, the survey was conducted two years after graduation.  This year, the survey was done three years out, with graduates being interviewed in 2013 about

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Early Results from the National Graduates Survey: The Good News

Some very early National Graduates Survey (NGS) results are out, and they’re mostly good news.  The NGS – for the uninitiated – surveys university and college graduates two years after graduation.  It’s closely watched for its numbers on graduate employment, income, and debt.  Statscan has been doing this now for a little over thirty years (the first one was on the class of 1982), and since 1990 it has been conducted every five years. Usually, when Statscan does a major

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Some Final Thoughts on German Apprenticeships

If you’ve been following our Minister of Employment and Social Development, Jason Kenney, lately, you’ll know that he’s taken a keen interest in German apprenticeships.  So much so that his office recently organized a study trip to Germany, to which various provincial education ministers and Ottawa association types were also invited. There are, basically, eight major differences between our system of apprenticeships and theirs. To wit: 1)      Our apprenticeship system is post-secondary, and caters to people in their 20s.  Theirs is

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The Canadian Way of Higher Education Subsidies

One of the biggest arguments in student assistance is about who to subsidize and why.  Unfortunately, because we are rarely explicit in the way we talk about subsidies, discussions tend to be a dialogue of the deaf. One school of thought says we should subsidize students based on their parental income.  Students from poor families need more help to succeed than students from wealthier families, and so the former should pay less, and so we should pay them grants to

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Canadian Higher Ed Exceptionalism, Part 1 (An Occasional Series)

For awhile now, I’ve been writing about other national systems of higher education in our, “Better Know a Higher Ed System” series, in part to throw Canada’s own policy system into sharp relief. But sometimes it’s better to look at some things a bit more directly, so today I want to start exploring some areas where Canada really is an exception, globally.  And there’s nowhere we stick out more than in the way we admit students to university. There are

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