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Category: PSE Outcomes

A New U

When it comes to education and the labour market, universities (well, the bits outside the professional schools, anyway) like to say they are in the business of preparing students not for their first job but for their fifth, or (more grandiosely), “preparing them for life”.  There are some powerful reasons for and assumptions behind that statement, and on the whole this view has served universities and their graduates well over the past few centuries.  But in a world where experience

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January 11, 2019 No Comments

New Statscan Graduate Earnings Data

For some time now, Statistics Canada has been working on at least partially superseding the National Graduates Survey (NGS) with something much better – a direct link between school-record and tax data, allowing for a more thorough and complete examination of trends in education and the labour market. For context: the NGS dates to 1982 (though it had a forerunner in 1976).  It’s a survey which was originally delivered to the graduating classes of 1982, 1986, 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005 and

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December 12, 2018 No Comments

HEQCO’s Intriguing Skills Report

HEQCO produced a fascinating report on skills last week, which I want to explore in depth.  Unfortunately, it has put a few people’s backs up because of a couple of poorly-chosen sentences in a covering press release, which I will also explore.  But let’s focus on the first bit, because simply putting this study took an enormous amount of effort that needs to be acknowledged and celebrated. (Actually, they released two intriguing reports: one on literacy and numeracy and one on critical thinking. 

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December 4, 2018 1 Comment

Critical Friends

A few times a year I get asked to help with the drafting a university or college’s strategic plan.  Usually nothing major: a little bit of environmental scanning, talking about industry trends, that kind of thing.  I think I do enough to get a decent sense of where the pain points are in academic and strategic planning.  The most important one I wrote about back here – the fact that strategic planning is often done around academics rather than with them, mainly

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June 1, 2018 5 Comments

Better Feedback

Universities (and to a lesser extent colleges) are sometimes accused of being change-resistant.  Various stakeholders have lots of valuable feedback to give, so the critique goes, but institutions Just. Don’t Listen.   This critique has some merit but misses the mark in some major ways.  Institutions solicit and receive feedback all the time.  I just don’t think the questions being asked are always very good ones, and the people whose opinions are being solicited are not always the right ones. Here’s an

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May 31, 2018 4 Comments

One Thought to Start Your Day

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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