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Category: Data

Why is there an “S” in STEM?

Governments love to talk about STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) programs. They were given prominent space in the last Canadian federal budget, and the acronym permeates U.S. educational policy discourse. It’s conventional wisdom that increasing the number of STEM graduates is essential to economic growth. You might think that the chief purpose of the modern post-secondary institution is to churn out graduates in STEM fields – and that as a corollary, arts students are some sort of vestigial leftover

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August 31, 2011 1 Comment

Anticipating Demographic Shifts

I was in Regina last week speaking to the university’s senior management team about challenges in Canadian post-secondary education, when someone asked a really intriguing question. “Given the changing demographics of Canada, with fewer traditional-aged students, are there any examples of good practice of universities altering their programming serving non-traditional students instead”? I have to admit, I was stumped. You’d think, for instance, that maritime universities, who have been facing demographic decline for quite some time, would have some experience

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August 30, 2011 1 Comment

Data Point of the Week: Comparing Academic Salaries

If there’s one subject we write about that gets people riled up, it’s academic salaries in Canada and the U.S. It’s a complicated issue – so let’s look at concrete examples at three of the better-paying Canadian institutions (Trent, Calgary and McMaster) and three prestigious American universities (Dartmouth, Washington and Berkeley). If you just look at baseline salaries for two sets of institutions, you see some pretty big differences as shown in Figure 1, below. The gap is bigger for

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August 24, 2011 No Comments

Data Point of the Week: These are Fantastic Graphs

…from U.S. researchers Stuart Rojstaczer and Christopher Healy on the subject of grade inflation. So fantastic, in fact, that I think I’ll mostly let them speak for themselves.   And this, of course, is at a time when institutions are becoming less selective, not more. Interestingly, though, it’s U.S. private universities – generally speaking more selective than publics – that are leading the grade inflation charge.   Since there’s no data to suggest that students are working harder than they

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August 17, 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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