Category: PSE Outcomes

Millennial Complaints (Part 1)

Unless you’ve been under a rock the last decade or so, you will be familiar with the line of argument that millennials are a uniquely put-upon (or, in the vernacular, “screwed”) generation.  They are over-educated, over-indebted, condemned to never get on the success ladder, etc…you know the story. The question is: how true is it? The answer is: it depends in large part on which millennials we are talking about and to whom you want to compare them. Let’s start

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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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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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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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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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