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Category: PSE Outcomes

A New Deal

Yesterday, I noted that  for the last few years provincial governments have refused to either increase funding to PSE institutions to keep up with inflation, or give institutions latitude to raise tuition to make up the difference. Effectively, provincial governments seem a lot more concerned with ensuring that post-secondary education is cheap than with ensuring that it continues to receive real increases in income. There are competing opinions about why this is the case. My view is simply that few provincial

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April 14, 2016 2 Comments

Overproducing Graduates For The Win!

A few weeks ago, my colleague Melonie Fullick teed off in her University Affairs column on some of the rhetoric around calls to increase the number of PhDs. Universities always like these kind of calls (and – guilty – I’ve made them myself), because they mean some combination of more money and more horsepower to do advanced research (in the Sciences at least). But universities are obviously producing a lot more PhDs than they are ever going to hire, and

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April 8, 2016 1 Comment

Fuzzy Skills

About a month ago, Universities Canada held a meeting to talk up the Liberal Arts.  I wasn’t there, and can only go by what I saw on twitter and what I can glean from this University Affairs article which you can read here.  But if the conversation was actually anything like what the sub-head suggests it was (we need better stories!), I’m not impressed. At one level, “we need better stories” is always true.  Good communication is always worthwhile.  But if you claim

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April 6, 2016 1 Comment

Consumerism Dragging Down Student Achievement? Not so Fast

So, there was an interesting article from Studies in Higher Education making the rounds on social media yesterday. Written by a trio of UK researchers, the article is entitled “The Student-as-Consumer Approach in Higher Education and its Effects on Academic Performance”, and is – miraculously – available ungated, here. The short version is that students who have a consumerist attitude towards education tend to have lower academic performance. For those who bewail the encroachment of consumerist attitudes in higher education,

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February 18, 2016 1 Comment

The Future of Work (and What it Means for Higher Education), Part 1

Back in the 1990s when we were in a recession, Jeremy Rifkin wrote a book called The End of Work, which argued that unemployment would remain high forever because of robots, information technology, yadda yadda, whatever.  Cue the longest peacetime economic expansion of the century. Now, we have a seemingly endless parade of books prattling on about how work is going to disappear: Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s The Second Machine Age, Martin Ford’s Rise of the Robots, Jerry Kaplan’s Humans Need not Apply, Susskind and Susskind’s The Future of the Professions: How Technology will Transform

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January 27, 2016 1 Comment

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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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