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Category: Universities

Actual Data on Transfer Credit (Part 2)

It’s easy to make transfer credit seem like a really big deal.  Outside of BC and Alberta, institutional credit transfer policies are pretty ad hoc, and there’s no shortage of anecdotes about students having to re-do courses they’ve already done.  But little data has hitherto been available to help us understand the extent to which credit transfer policies affect times-to-completion. Until now. Using HESA’s CanEd Student Panel, we examined this question from a couple of different angles.  Figure 1 gives

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April 3, 2013 1 Comment

Understanding Credit Transfer (Part 1)

Every once in awhile, the issue of credit transfer pops up.  Usually, it’s in the context of “learning efficiency” – some politician or deputy minister starts off with, “why can’t my son/daughter/constituent get full credit for previous learning”, and follows that with some diatribe about how universities and colleges “just don’t get it”, etc, etc. Right now, this script is playing out in Alberta, where the Advanced Education Minister is asking institutions to create ten per cent more “seamless learner

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April 2, 2013 1 Comment

Times Higher Education Reputation Rankings 2013

You’ll recall that yesterday, in reference to the orgy of hype that accompanies the annual release of the THE World Reputation Rankings, I made the point that universities’ reputation really doesn’t change all that much on a year-by-year basis, and that, therefore, perhaps said orgy was a wee bit overdone. When all was said and done, five universities (Arizona, Indiana, Leeds, U Zurich, and Tel Aviv) fell out of the rankings, with a similar number replacing them (Monash, Moscow State,

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March 5, 2013 4 Comments

Some Consequences of Declining Public Funding

Home truth: while total funding for higher education has increased rather substantially over the past couple of decades, an increasing proportion of this funding has come from private sources.  If anything, that trend is going to continue for the next decade, at least.  Unfortunately, our decision-making structures and mentalities are stuck in the era when institutions could count on governments to bail them out. I noticed this initially during the St. FX strike.  One of the main lines of discourse

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February 20, 2013 2 Comments

A Revolution in Faculty Bargaining?

Earlier this week, I was riffing on how to make good salary comparisons when I came across a faculty union which has been doing just that. The faculty union at the University of Victoria is feeling a bit aggrieved that its members’ pay is lower than at comparable universities.  When I first saw their numbers, I was a bit skeptical: UVic went through a significant generational shift nine or ten years ago, so their age/rank profile might potentially account for some of

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February 15, 2013 6 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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