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Category: PSE Outcomes

A Very Odd Employment “Study”

Many of you will have seen a Toronto Star story last week about a new report from the Ontario government indicating that in the wake of the recession, the provincial economy was creating more new jobs for college grads and apprentices than for university graduates.  Cue blather about how technology and the recession are radically changing the labour market, etc. Did anyone else find it odd that the Star never named the study?  I still haven’t been able to locate an actual

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January 23, 2012 2 Comments

Graduate Surveys We’d Like to See

If there’s one type of Canadian educational survey where complete and utter stasis has set in, it’s graduate surveys. Questions like “are you employed,” “what are your earnings,” and “were you satisfied with your education” aren’t just boring, I think they’re actively making us stupider. There seems to be a general view that because the answers to these questions don’t change very much from year to year, that we’re doing as good a job as we ever have. But labour

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January 20, 2012 2 Comments

The Benefits of Liberal Arts: Are Humanities Fit for Purpose?

The “liberal” in “liberal arts” derives from the latin root for “free,” but not the way that most people think. The medieval Liberal Arts were not free in the sense that they promoted freedom or free thinking, but rather in the sense that it was the education that “free” people (i.e., the rich) chose to pursue. The term connotes conspicuous consumption rather than freedom. Because Liberal Arts – and in particular the humanities – were always the preserve of the

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December 6, 2011 1 Comment

Graduate Incomes and Getting Better Data

With most of the world undergoing a serious bout of youth unemployment, there’s been a lot of focus on graduate earnings and whether or not we are “overproducing” graduates. As I’ve noted before, some of this talk is nonsense, but given the times, the focus on outcomes isn’t surprising. Don’t tell Margaret Wente, but in China the government is actively cutting majors that don’t produce high levels of post-graduation employment. In the U.S., there’s an increasing number of stories (like

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November 30, 2011 1 Comment

Beyond Co-op (Part Two)

Yesterday, I wrote about the results of our study on work-integrated learning, where we reported on the results of a survey asking students to tell us how much they thought their various jobs helped them in terms of reinforcing concepts learned in class, obtaining workplace skills and career preparation. In particular, I emphasized that while co-op programs came more or less top of the pack on these measures, two other types of employment were found capable of delivering very similar

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November 24, 2011 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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