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Category: Institutions

Access to Opportunity

There’s been a fair bit of talk over the past few months about the practice of articling in Ontario.  Specifically, the problem is that there are too many law school graduates for too few articling positions.  The situation has deteriorated to the point where the Law Society of Upper Canada has released a major report outlining an “alternative work experience,” in order to deal with the surplus of students who don’t get “real” articling positions.   For what it’s worth, I tend to

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December 5, 2012 No Comments

Mental Health on Campus

There’s a lot of talk about mental health on campus these days – Sunday’s Globe feature, a Toronto Star piece from last week, and the September cover story in Maclean’s, are but three recent examples.  Part of what seems to be driving the increased concern is that the kids affected by this crisis aren’t necessarily the ones on the margin, but are often amongst those considered to be “high-achievers.” Without casting doubt on the seriousness of the issue – and it is

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December 4, 2012 2 Comments

Mystifying University Taglines

I know it’s tough to differentiate yourself in an industry as conservative as higher education, but sometimes you have to wonder about some of the taglines, slogans, and ads that institutions come up with.  Herewith, a brief list of the most puzzling: #1 – University of Toronto – “Canada’s Answer to the World’s Questions”.  Seriously, did they just not bother to focus-test this on anyone who’s ever lived outside the GTA?  It plays into every possible negative stereotype about the city

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December 3, 2012 4 Comments

Narcissism of Small Differences – Admissions Edition

Why do Canadian universities make admissions so complicated? A couple of years ago, for a client, I took a look at the number of different undergraduate admissions requirements there were to various universities.  What I found was that at comprehensive universities in Ontario, there tended to be no fewer that 15 separate sets of admission requirements to various programs or faculties, and at some universities it was as high as 20. Nearly all of them required grade 12 English (though

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November 8, 2012 1 Comment

Reforming J-Schools

I see that a number of foundations – including the Knight, McCormick and Scripps-Howard Foundation– have written an open letter  to American university presidents, urging that they make Journalism schools “more like medical schools” and teaching them through immersion in “clinical, hands-on, real-life experience”. From a historical perspective, this is a deeply weird development. Foundations have played a significant role in changing the course of professional education on a couple of occasions. In 1910, the American Medical Association and the

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October 31, 2012 2 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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