Category: Institutions

Te Wānanga o Aotearoa

A couple of weeks ago, I promised I would tell you the story of Te Wānanga o Aotearoa, the entirely Maori-run polytechnic with over 35,000 students.  So here it is. The 1970s saw significant Aboriginal cultural revivals in many parts of the world.  Aboriginal higher education – or at least the access of aboriginal peoples to mainstream higher education – was a significant part of that.  In Canada, the struggle was mostly about gaining a foothold in mainstream institutions; in

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Systematically Valuing the Wrong Things

Michael Staton is a former teacher, venture capitalist, and founder of Uversity, which is a kind of data nerd Strategic Enrolment Management outfit in the US.  He also has some interesting ideas about the “unbundling” of higher education, which have appeared – amongst other places – in Andrew Kelly and Kevin Carey’s recent book Stretching the Higher Education Dollar (ungated copy available here). His take is that there are four basic groups of services that undergraduate education strives to deliver, and that in at

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Welcome to the Crisis

I just took a look at the new enrolment confirmation statistics for Ontario universities.  They are jaw-dropping. Overall, the system experienced its first fall in “number of confirmed enrolments from secondary school” since (I believe) the early 1990s (I say “I believe” because OUAC doesn’t have public stats that go that far back, but I think that’s right).  Ever since the double-cohort, the province’s universities have seen a steady annual 3% bump in total direct-entry enrolments.  That’s been the source

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Hosanna! *More* Graduate Income Data!

Okay, so I goofed on Tuesday.  Contrary to what I said, Colleges Ontario actually does publish sector-wide data on graduate incomes six months out – they just don’t publish it with the rest of the KPI data.  Instead, it’s at the back of the graduate outcomes section of their excellent annual Environment Scan (thanks to Glenn for the heads up).  So let’s take a look at what they say. On Tuesday we noted that graduate employment outcomes for college graduates six-months out seemed to

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More Graduate Labour Market Data

Yesterday I showed that recent Ontario university graduates’ incomes are taking a beating, notably in Arts and Sciences.  I’m sure this led to a fair bit of crowing among those who claim we have too many students in university, and they all oughta go to college instead because skills, new economy, yadda yadda. The problem with that argument is that college grads are getting creamed in the labour market, too. Now, we can’t compare university and college outcomes in terms of

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