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Category: Canada

Miserable Toronto Students: Cutting to the Chase

Loyal readers will know we’ve been studying why Toronto students are so miserable for some time now. But we think we’ve found the jackpot here. Up until now, we’ve mostly been looking at common institutional factors that seem to result in lower satisfaction levels. But it’s time to take a really good look at Toronto students themselves. Could it be that they’re just more demanding/prone to complain/ likely to kvetch? In a word, are they just more crotchety than students

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December 9, 2011 3 Comments

Graduate Incomes and Getting Better Data

With most of the world undergoing a serious bout of youth unemployment, there’s been a lot of focus on graduate earnings and whether or not we are “overproducing” graduates. As I’ve noted before, some of this talk is nonsense, but given the times, the focus on outcomes isn’t surprising. Don’t tell Margaret Wente, but in China the government is actively cutting majors that don’t produce high levels of post-graduation employment. In the U.S., there’s an increasing number of stories (like

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November 30, 2011 1 Comment

Weak Arguments

I am a social scientist. I like the social sciences. I also like the humanities, even if I do find many people’s defense of the humanities to be shrill and weirdly ahistorical. So, naturally, I’m a fan of SSHRC. What I am not a fan of, however, is some of the drivel that passes for advocacy on SSHRC’s behalf. One argument that gets pulled out every once in awhile and which annoys me immensely is the one that says, “Social

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November 28, 2011 1 Comment

Grades, Satisfaction and Miserable Toronto Students

It’s been noted many times (here, for instance) that professors who give easy As tend to do better on course evaluations than those who don’t. But does this work at the institutional level as well? It’s hard to tell directly because all institutions essentially grade on the same curve. But we can get at it indirectly by looking at the gap between high school and university grades, which does vary significantly – at more selective institutions, students see a drop;

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November 25, 2011 No Comments

Beyond Co-op (Part One)

One perennial topic of interest in Canadian higher education (particularly during recessions) is the subject of Work-Integrated Learning – that is, work experience which is organized by an educational institution and which is incorporated into a student’s educational programme. Today, HESA is releasing a paper by Miriam Kramer and me on how students’ work experiences stack up in terms of learning outcomes that contain some interesting results. We asked a little over 2,100 students about a variety of work experiences:

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November 23, 2011 1 Comment

One Thought to Start Your Day

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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