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Category: Colleges and Polytechnics

Three Unconnected Thoughts on PSE and Aboriginal Peoples

1)      Changing Disciplines In the last five years or so, I’ve seen a real change in the way Aboriginal students are moving through the country’s PSE system.  For a whole number of reasons, aboriginal students were traditionally concentrated either in humanities disciplines like history and sociology, or they were in disciplines which led to careers in social services or direct band employment (child care, police foundations, education, nursing).  STEM and Business fields simply weren’t in the picture.  That’s changed substantially over

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May 27, 2016 3 Comments

What’s Going On With College Graduates in Ontario?

I see that Ken Coates and Bill Morrison have just written a new book  called Dream Factories: Why Universities Won’t Solve The Youth Jobs Crisis.  I haven’t read it yet, but judging by the title I’d assume that it makes pretty much the same argument Coates made back in this 2015 paper  for the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, which in effect was “fewer university students, more tradespeople!” (my critique of this paper is here) With the fall in commodity prices, it’s

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May 2, 2016 No Comments

Comparing Per-Student University Expenditures by Category (2)

This is part 2 of a two-parter on how Canadian universities spend their money.  All the stuff about what data I’m using, caveats thereto, etc., are available in yesterday’s post.  If you missed yesterday, go catch up here. First, two small mea culpas from yesterday.  First, due to a cut/paste error, part of the data on student services that went out yesterday was slightly off, but has now been corrected on the website.  Second, I neglected to mention that the

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April 27, 2016 1 Comment

Comparing Per-Student University Expenditures by Category (1)

Just for giggles the other day, I took a look at Canadian university expenditures in 2013-14 using (as usual) the CAUBO/Statscan Financial Information of Universities and Colleges Survey.  I looked at operating expenditures by category.  Then I normalized them per FTE student.  And I got some very weird results which I thought I would share with y’all. What I am going to do in this series is show you the results for the main categories of expenditure which are “non-academic”. 

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April 26, 2016 4 Comments

Why Class Size Matters (Up to a Point)

At the outset of the MOOC debate about four years ago, there was a line of argument that went something like this: MOOC Enthusiast:  These MOOCs are great.  Now the classroom is not a barrier.  Now we can teach hundreds of thousands of students at a time!  Quel efficiency! Not MOOC Enthusiast:  They’re just videos.  They can’t give you the same human touch as an in-class experience with a professor. MOOC Enthusiast: How’s that human touch going for you in the 1,000-person intro class? To which there was

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January 11, 2016 6 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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