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Category: Universities

In Praise of Downward Mobility

One much-used trope, among those wanting to bash higher education, attacks the idea of “downward mobility”.  Typically, a journalist finds a kid from a nice middle-class family, having a hard time making-it in the labour market, and uses this as a platform for a string of Wente-isms:  “Higher education is supposed to be about upward mobility – but now graduates are downwardly mobile!  Won’t somebody please think of the children?” Etc. etc. But upward mobility is greatly overrated.  Downward mobility

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April 12, 2013 No Comments

Paying For the Party

Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality is a quite remarkable new work of ethnography, by sociologists Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton.  I recommend it unreservedly for student professionals, or anyone interested in how university affects social mobility. Embedded in a women’s dormitory at a large, unnamed Midwestern flagship state university (which, if I had to guess, is probably either Indiana or Illinois), the authors observed the girls on one floor for a year, and then conducted regular follow-up interviews

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April 11, 2013 No Comments

Time for a New Duff-Berdahl?

Reading Peter C. Kent’s book on the Strax Affair at UNB – in which the case’s denouement was significantly affected by the then-recently-released report of the Duff-Berdahl commission – got me thinking about university governance. In Canada, university governance has mostly been run on a bicameral Senate/Board model for over a century.  In 1963, the Englishman, Sir James Duff, and the American, Robert O. Berdahl, were jointly appointed by AUCC and CAUT to look into how to modernize university governance, and reduce the

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April 10, 2013 3 Comments

No to “World-Class” Research in the Humanities

You often hear talk about how Canadian institutions need to do more research.  Better research.  “World-class” research, even.  Research that will prove how smart our professors are, how efficient they are with public resources, and, hence, justify a claim to an even greater share of those resources. In medicine, the biological sciences, and engineering, this call is easy to understand.  Developments in these areas can – with the right environment for commercialization – lead to new products, which, in turn,

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April 5, 2013 11 Comments

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

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April 4, 2013 7 Comments

One Thought to Start Your Day

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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