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Category: PSE Outcomes

Two (Relatively) Good News Studies

A quick summary of two studies that came out this week which everyone should know about. Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) On Tuesday, the results for the 2015 PISA tests were released.  PISA is, of course, that multi-country assessment of 15 year-olds in math, science and reading which takes place every three years and is managed by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).  PISA is not a test of curriculum knowledge (in an international context that would

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December 7, 2016 1 Comment

Universal co-op, Minister? You first.

Back in June here in Ontario, the Premier’s Highly Skilled Workforce Expert Panel released its final report. One of the recommendations was that every Ontario high school and university student should have at least one mandatory co-op experience (i.e., once in high school, once in university college).  In a statement in the provincial legislature, the Minister of Advanced Education and Skills Development Deb Matthews essentially said she liked the recommendation and would be working in the coming months to figure out

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October 17, 2016 No Comments

The Canadian Way of Study Abroad

A few years ago, I think around the time that HESA Towers ran a conference on internationalization, I realized there was something weird about the way Canadian higher education institutions talked about study abroad.  They talked about it as helping students “bridge the gap between theory and practice”, “increasing engagement”, and “hands-on learning”. That’s odd, I thought.  That sounds like experiential learning, not study abroad.  Which is when it hit me: in Canada, unlike virtually everywhere else in the world,

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September 14, 2016 1 Comment

Measuring the Effects of Study Abroad

In the higher education advocacy business, an unhappily large proportion of the research used is of the correlation = causation type.  For instance, many claim that higher education has lots of social benefits like lower crime rates and higher rates of community volunteering on the grounds that outcomes of graduates are better than outcomes of non-graduates in these areas.  But this is shaky.  There are very few studies which look at this carefully enough to eliminate selection bias – that

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September 13, 2016 1 Comment

Reminder: Hot Jobs and Hot Careers Never Last

There was an interesting piece in the National Post last week about unemployed professionals in the Alberta oil and gas industry.  In amidst the occasional whine about the oil industry being so unloved by the rest Canada, there is a serious article about what happens to people in specialized professions when the economic tide swings away from that profession.  Some quotes: Philip Mulder, spokesman for the Association of Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta (APEGA), said its geoscientists are faring badly in

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September 1, 2016 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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