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Category: Institutions

The End of College? (Part 2)

As discussed yesterday, Kevin Carey’s The End of College pinpoints higher education’s key ills in its inability (or unwillingness) to provide students with any real signal about the quality of their work.  This serves students badly in a number of ways.  First, it makes finding job matches harder, and second, it means institutions can mis-sell themselves by investing in the accoutrements of excellence (ivy, quads, expensive residences) without its substance. Essentially, Carey believes that technology will solve these problems.  He’s not a

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March 12, 2015 3 Comments

The End of College? (Part 1)

Over the next couple of days, I want to talk a bit about a new book called The End of College, written by the New America Foundation’s Kevin Carey.  It’s an important book not just because it’s been excerpted repeatedly in some major publications, or because the conclusions are correct (in my view: they’re not), but because it has an unerringly precise diagnosis of how higher education came to its present malaise, and the nature of the economic and institutional reasons that

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March 11, 2015 1 Comment

Maritime Problems

A couple of weeks ago, Leo Charbonneau over at University Affairs wrote a nice little piece on Maritime universities and the trouble they’re having.  The basic message is that universities out there aren’t doomed – part of the “Don’t Panic” line that AUCC seems to be putting out these days.  The argument was essentially: hey, just nudge the participation rate a point or two, and improve retention a little bit, and those plucky little eastern universities will do just fine. Allow

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March 10, 2015 2 Comments

Sessionals, Nursing Degrees, and the Meaning of University

Be forewarned: I am going to be very mean about universities today.  One thing the labour disputes in Ontario highlight is the amount of undergraduate teaching done by non-tenure track professors.  Numbers on this are hard to come by, and poorly defined when they are.  York sessionals claim to be teaching 42% of all undergraduate classes – but how do you define a class?  But from what I’ve gathered from talking to people across the province who are in a

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March 9, 2015 5 Comments

Some Thoughts on TA Strikes

At the time of writing (Thursday PM), Teaching Assistant Unions at both the University of Toronto and York University are on strike, as is the union representing sessionals at York.  Since Toronto is indeed “The Centre of the Universe”, I’m sure everyone across the country is just riveted by this news.  At the risk of irritating those readers still further, I thought I’d jot down a few thoughts on the matter. 1)      A lot of people seem to be wondering “why

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March 6, 2015 3 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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