Category: Institutions

Stories Arts Faculties Tell Themselves

Here at HESA towers, we’ve been doing some work on how students make decisions about choosing a university (if you’re interested: the Student Decisions Project was a multi-wave, qualitative, year-long longitudinal study that tracked several hundred Grade 12 students as they went through the PSE research, application, and enrolment process.  We also took a more targeted qualitative look, specifically at Arts, with the national Prospective Arts Students Survey).  We’ve been trying to do the same for colleges, but it’s a

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Curious Data on Teaching Loads in Ontario

Back in 2006, university Presidents got so mad at Maclean’s that they stopped providing data to the publication.  Recognizing that this might create the impression that they had something to hide, they developed something called “Common University Dataset Ontario” (CUDO) to provide the public with a number of important quantitative descriptors of each university.  In theory, this data is of better quality and more reliable than the stuff they used to give Maclean’s. One of the data elements in CUDO has

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Yukon College’s Difficult Path to University Status

Last week, Yukon Education Minister Doug Graham announced that the territory was going to change the name of Yukon College to Yukon University.  The College then proceeded to state that it would launch new degree programs and seek membership in Universities Canada in 2017. Well, now.  How is that going to work exactly? Universities Canada has some pretty clear guidelines about membership.  Point 4 says that a prospective member must have “… as its core teaching mission the provision of

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What Canadians Think About Universities, and Where Canadian Universities Want To Go

A couple of quick notes about two interesting things from Universities Canada this week. The first is the release of some public opinion polling, which they commissioned in the spring, regarding universities and other forms of higher education.  You can see the whole thing here, but I want to highlight a couple of slides, in particular. The first is this one:                   It seems Canadians are overwhelmingly positive about most post-secondary institutions

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Free the Satellites

The University of Toronto has a problem (several, actually, but I’m trying to keep these short).  And the problem is that if you’re not actually at U of T, and someone says “U of T”, what do you think of?  The answer, of course, is the St. George campus: that big and occasionally beautiful hunk of land East of Queen’s Park, College, and Bloor. But what about the other two campuses? It’s easy to forget about the Scarborough and Mississauga

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