Category: Colleges and Polytechnics

Correlation and Causation in Technical Education

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: “In many Northern and Central European countries, including Switzerland and Germany, there are robust apprenticeship programs. In both of those countries, youth unemployment is very low compared to Canada and the U.S.” Or this: “As the economy changes, however, it is increasingly clear that this is the polytechnic moment… in the recent recession, youth unemployment was lower in countries with strong vocational training programs.” There are three propositions here.  One is that Canada’s

Read More »

2013-14 Provincial Budget Analysis

The last of the provincial budgets was delivered last week, so it’s time for a quick analysis of spending on operating funding for universities and colleges. Some important caveats on this data: Budgets often have only a vague relationship with what actually gets spent.  Last year in Quebec, for instance, what eventually got allocated to institutions was a good $120 million less than what was budgeted.  So numbers for 2013-14 need to be viewed as provisional.  And to be consistent,

Read More »

More Data on Credit Transfer (Part 3)

So, yesterday we saw that, in fact, the vast majority of transfer students receive credit for their previous work, and in quite substantial amounts as well.  But what about the credits that didn’t get recognized? There’s a pretty clear correlation between non-recognition and changing programs.  Overall, university transfer students said that more than 60% of their credits were accepted for transfer (among those who had any credit accepted, it was roughly 75%).  But as the figure below shows, the results were

Read More »

Actual Data on Transfer Credit (Part 2)

It’s easy to make transfer credit seem like a really big deal.  Outside of BC and Alberta, institutional credit transfer policies are pretty ad hoc, and there’s no shortage of anecdotes about students having to re-do courses they’ve already done.  But little data has hitherto been available to help us understand the extent to which credit transfer policies affect times-to-completion. Until now. Using HESA’s CanEd Student Panel, we examined this question from a couple of different angles.  Figure 1 gives

Read More »

That Conservative White Paper

On Tuesday, the Ontario Conservatives released a “white paper” on Higher Education.  It’s an extraordinary document, by far the most detailed vision for PSE ever released by a Canadian political party.  Everyone in higher education should read it, even if they aren’t likely to enjoy it much. Much of the paper revolves around the notion of reducing the cost of delivery of higher education.  For that reason, it liberally raids the ideas of Ian Clark et. al on teaching faculty, as

Read More »