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Category: PSE Outcomes

Graduate Income Data Miracle on the Rideau

My friend and colleague Ross Finnie has just published a remarkable series of papers on long-term outcomes from higher education, which everyone needs to go read, stat. What he’s done is taken 13 years of student data from the University of Ottawa and linked it to income tax data held by Statistics Canada.  That means he can track income patterns by field of study, not over the puny 6-24 month period commonly used by provincial surveys, or the new 36-month

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November 25, 2014 3 Comments

The Arts Problem(s)

There’s no polite way to say this: Canadian universities have an Arts problem. At the heart of institutions’ looming fiscal problems is their inability to convince major customer groups (government, students) to pay the desired price for the product they’re offering.  The reason for this, mainly, is the perception that the product on offer is not value-for-money.  Part of this is due to our ludicrously opaque student aid systems, which lead students and families and politicians into thinking that net

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November 24, 2014 2 Comments

Preparing Students for the Workforce

There’s a line I hear every once in awhile from profs (mainly, but not exclusively, in the humanities) saying something to the effect of: their job is not to prepare students for the world of work; rather, they want to prepare students’ minds to be critical thinkers or better citizens, or something like that.  Actually, it’s usually phrased less delicately, like: “I’m not preparing kids to be cannon fodder for the knowledge economy”; “I don’t give a damn what employers think, I

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November 13, 2014 3 Comments

The Future of Transcripts

In theory, transcripts are a way to communicate a student or graduate’s academic achievement in higher education.  The problem is, they only really communicate achievements to other people in academia.  Outside academia, they’re fairly useless. They say nothing about the skills a student may or may not have acquired at school.  They say nothing about what extra-curricular activities a student has engaged in.  At best, they communicate the lists of classes that a student took (though without curricula, it’s difficult

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November 5, 2014 2 Comments

A Venn Diagram About Skills Gaps

Short and sweet today, folks, as I know you’re all busy. We’ve done a lot of research over the years at HESA Towers.  We read up on what employers want – and we also do studies that look at how recent graduates fare in the labour market, and what they wish they’d had more of while in university.  And pretty much, without exception, regardless of field of study, those two sources agree on what students need to be better-prepared for

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October 1, 2014 3 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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