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Category: History Lesson

A Brief History of Exams

Written exams are such a major part of our schools and universities that we forget sometimes that they are not actually native to the western system of education.  How did they become so ubiquitous?  Well here’s the story: Originally, the Western tradition eschewed exams.  Universities offered places based on recommendations.  If one could impress one’s teachers for a few years, one might be invited to audition for right to be granted a degree. In medieval universities, for instance, one obtained

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October 5, 2016 2 Comments

Overproducing Graduates For The Win!

A few weeks ago, my colleague Melonie Fullick teed off in her University Affairs column on some of the rhetoric around calls to increase the number of PhDs. Universities always like these kind of calls (and – guilty – I’ve made them myself), because they mean some combination of more money and more horsepower to do advanced research (in the Sciences at least). But universities are obviously producing a lot more PhDs than they are ever going to hire, and

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April 8, 2016 1 Comment

The Inter-Generational Equity Thing

I see that one of my favourite student groups, the Ontario Undergraduate Student Association (OUSA), has come out in favour of a tuition freeze.  Fair enough; not many students endorse fee increases, after all.  But the stated rationale for wanting one is a bit disappointing – mixing, as it does, poor historical analysis with poor generational politics. Here’s their thinking: In 1980, student contributions to university operating budgets in Ontario, which include tuition and fees, were only 18 per cent. In 2014, accounting

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January 20, 2016 2 Comments

The Allure of the (G)Olden Days

Among the many things that drive me completely crazy about discourse in higher education is the mythologizing about “the olden days”.  You know, before “neoliberalism” came along, and research was non-instrumental, people “valued knowledge for its own sake”, classes were tiny, and managers were things that happened to other people. Whenever I hear this kind of thinking, part of me wants to say “and when was this again?” But that’s a bit flip: there is some truth to each of these claims of

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January 19, 2016 5 Comments

The Higher Education of Heads of Government

To follow up on yesterday’s musings about the educational history of Canadian Prime Ministers: I think you can tell something about a country’s social structure just by looking at the clustering of leaders’ educational backgrounds. In this exercise, I look at the records for Canadian, British, Australian, Japanese, and New Zealand Prime Ministers, German Chancellors, and French and American Presidents.  I would have included Italy but politicians’ Wikipedia bios are weirdly silent on education (even in the Italian versions).  I

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December 1, 2015 1 Comment
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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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