Category: Media

Can’t Get No Satisfaction (Data)

Many of you will have heard by now that the Globe and Mail has decided not to continue its annual student survey, which we at HESA ran for the last three years.  The newspaper will continue publishing the annual Canadian University Report, but will now do so without any quantitative ratings. Some institutions will probably greet this news with a yawn, but for a number of others, the development represents a real blow.  There were a number of institutions who based a large

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Those “Lost Generation” Stories

I see Maclean’s is cashing in on the zeitgeist with yet another story about a “lost generation“.  These stories always cover the same arc: Find a young, bright, hardworking, recent graduate whose career, for one reason or another, hasn’t hit lift off; blame this situation on the recession, even though that link can’t really be proven; provide some cod-economic arguments as to why this state of affairs is permanent; repeat. But we should know it’s not true, because we’ve seen

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Those Big, Bad, “American-style” Program Reviews

Hi everyone, and welcome back. The best education story of the winter break was almost certainly the Globe piece on program reviews at Canadian universities.  Despite an inane headline (when it comes to a policy’s unsuitability, nothing unites Canadian bien-pensants more than claims to an American origin), it’s an important piece about a useful process occurring at universities across Canada. HESA has directly contributed to two of these exercises (you can see some of our work, here), and with that experience I think

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The Other Shoe Drops

So, the victorious Parti Québécois, who believe so much in education, who spent all spring and summer hand-wringing and moaning about how that mean, mean Jean Charest was just so… so mean because he wouldn’t invest in Quebec’s youth, and whose election was a massive and historic victory because they cancelled those terrible, evil, neo-liberal tuition fee hikes, has just cut subsidies to all universities’ and colleges’ by five percent. Oh, and the cuts aren’t coming next year, they’re coming this year. 

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Discontent over Employment

It’s that time of year when the subjects of “education” and “jobs” are inextricably linked. When the economy is good, the stories are about go-getting recent graduates, and how they’re changing the world, etc. Universities then use this publicity to argue for more research money. “Look at all the great stuff our graduates do,” they say. “Our education gets kids jobs!” When the economy is bad, on the other hand, universities are subject to variations of Margaret Wente’s recent irritating

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