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Category: PSE Outcomes

Stories Arts Faculties Tell Themselves

Here at HESA towers, we’ve been doing some work on how students make decisions about choosing a university (if you’re interested: the Student Decisions Project was a multi-wave, qualitative, year-long longitudinal study that tracked several hundred Grade 12 students as they went through the PSE research, application, and enrolment process.  We also took a more targeted qualitative look, specifically at Arts, with the national Prospective Arts Students Survey).  We’ve been trying to do the same for colleges, but it’s a

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November 19, 2015 13 Comments

An Interesting but Irritating Report on Graduate Overqualification

On Thursday, the Office of Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) released a report on the state of the Canadian labour market.  It’s one of those things the PBO does because the state of the labour market drives the federal budget, to some extent.  But in this report, the PBO decided to do something different: it decided to look at the state of the labour market from the point of view of recent graduates, and specifically whether graduates are “overqualified” for their

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November 16, 2015 2 Comments

The Most Horrifying Book of the Year

One of the most famous studies on higher education and opportunity was published a little over fifteen years ago by economists Alan Krueger and Stacy Berg Dale.  Using something called the College and Beyond Survey, they followed over 6,000 students who had been accepted to American universities in 1976, and then looked at their outcomes almost twenty years later, in 1995.  The key finding was that holding SATs constant, school selectivity didn’t matter much.  The important thing wasn’t attending Harvard, it was

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October 15, 2015 1 Comment

Better Know a Higher Ed System: Brazil

Brazil is the smallest and probably the least-known of the BRICs.  It doesn’t have a big economy or a big diaspora like China or India, and it isn’t a former superpower like Russia.  But it is still the second-largest country in the Americas, and with more Brazilian students heading abroad, it’s a country well-worth knowing more about.  So here goes: First, it’s a pretty young system.  The first functioning university – Universidade de Sao Paolo (USP) – was founded in 1934 (prior

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October 2, 2015 No Comments

Improving the Discourse on Skills and Education

Recently, I did a fascinating set of roundtable discussions with employers and employer associations, and it brought home to me how one-dimensional much of our talk is regarding skills. Broadly speaking, there are four sets of skills employers care about.  The first are job- or occupation-related skills: can a mechanic actually fix a car? Can an architect design buildings? And so on.  By and large, if you ask employers whether universities and colleges are successfully providing their graduates with this

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September 10, 2015 2 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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