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Category: PSE Outcomes

Know Your Incoming Students (Part 2)

There are a lot of things “everybody knows” about students these days.  Everybody knows students these days think of their education in far more utilitarian terms than they used to, caring more about their jobs outcomes and less about the joy of learning.  Everybody knows it’s easier to get an A than it used to be.  And everybody knows students are working more because education is way more expensive.  Unfortunately, all of this is demonstrable twaddle.  As per yesterday, we can examine

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August 31, 2016 2 Comments

The low-wage graduate problem

The week before last, the Canadian Centre for the Study of Living Standards (CSLS) put out a report (available here) on trends on low-paid employment  in Canada from 1997 to 2014 (meaning full-time jobs occupied by 20-64 year olds where the hourly earnings are less than 66% of the national median).  It’s an interesting and not particularly sensationalist report based on Labour Force Survey public-use microdata; however one little factoid has sent many people into a tizzy.  Apparently, the percentage of people

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July 25, 2016 2 Comments

Moral Panics About Kids in Basements

Every once in awhile you see a news story saying something along the lines of “oh my, so many people in their 20s living with their failure to launch, my God, won’t somebody do something” followed usually by some freaking out about housing prices and – if we’re really lucky – something about humanities and working at Starbucks as well.  Like this one from the CBC last week. The excuse for that CBC piece was an American study which noted

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May 31, 2016 1 Comment

Diverse Sacrifices, Diverse Rewards, Diverse Policies

One of the trickiest things about developing smart higher education policy is that its clients are unbelievably diverse: privileged private-school educated 18 year-olds, first-generation students, working adults, etc.  And the returns to education are equally diverse: strong for Bachelors’ and Master’s Degrees but less so for Doctorates, often strong in professionally-oriented fields and less so in Arts (at least in the first few years).  Coming up with reasonable pricing and student aid policies that can be generally accepted as fair

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May 4, 2016 4 Comments

What’s Going On With College Graduates in Ontario?

I see that Ken Coates and Bill Morrison have just written a new book  called Dream Factories: Why Universities Won’t Solve The Youth Jobs Crisis.  I haven’t read it yet, but judging by the title I’d assume that it makes pretty much the same argument Coates made back in this 2015 paper  for the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, which in effect was “fewer university students, more tradespeople!” (my critique of this paper is here) With the fall in commodity prices, it’s

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May 2, 2016 No 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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