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Category: Canada

Compressing to Three

As we noted yesterday, there are four ways to go about getting university degrees from four years to three. One, cutting grad requirements from 120 to 90 credits, isn’t serious. A second, upping the use of prior learning assessment (or, in extremis, bringing back grade 13), is barely half-serious. That leaves curriculum compression and curriculum re-design. Curriculum compression is the significantly easier path. No need to change anything other than the speed of students’ path through the system. By getting them

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August 22, 2012 1 Comment

Four Ways to Three

The Ontario Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities, Glen Murray, has a bee in his bonnet about three-year undergraduate degrees. Basically, he’s been told there’s some fiscal consolidation coming, and he thinks three-year degrees are the way that institutions can deal with the coming troubles without – allegedly – affecting quality. There’s nothing inherently wrong with three-year degrees. All over Europe they are now standard (although in many countries, 80-90% of bachelor’s graduates go on to do a two-year Master’s

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August 21, 2012 3 Comments

That International Education Report

The Federal Task Force on International Education reported last week. It was… how to put this? Very Canadian. In essence, the report reads as though the goal of keeping all major stakeholders sweet trumped the goal of providing clear, bold thinking about Canada’s internationalization strategy. It’s worthy without challenging any conventional thinking. It puts forward an ambitious goal without spending much time working out the details of getting it done (the phrase “stakeholders should co-ordinate” does too much work in this

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August 20, 2012 1 Comment

Student Summer Unemployment

Summer employment for students, being a vital source of both income and experience, is one of those things that everyone agrees is really important but almost nobody understands. What students actually do in the summer months is a messy mix of work, school, volunteering and (occasionally) bumming around. Today, we’re releasing the 2012 edition of our series on summer employment (co-authored by new HESA associate Jacqueline Lambert and yours truly), entitled Making the Most of It: Canadian Student Employment in

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July 23, 2012 No Comments

Fall 2012: You’ve Been Warned

As we’re coming to the end of the school year, it’s worth looking ahead a bit to what we can expect next year.  You know, so you can obsess about it all summer before coming home. Public finances are only going to get worse.  Most provincial governments made their budget forecasts at a time when it looked like the US economy might be reaching take-off speed; that speed has now been firmly downgraded to “stall.” Throw in the non-negligible possibilities

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June 20, 2012 No 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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