Category: Policy

Student Surveys We’d Like to See

Surveys of current students tend to focus on just a few areas. Apart from questions about demographics and time use, they ask a lot of specific questions about satisfaction with student services along with a few general questions about overall satisfaction. This is odd, because at the end of the day students don’t actually think student services are central to the overall quality of their PSE experience. What they care about first and foremost is the quality of the teaching

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A Prayer for Noah Morris

Noah Morris runs the Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP). He is the unfortunate soul who has the unenviable task of implementing Dalton McGuinty’s promise to give students 30% tuition rebates if they came from families with less than $160,000 in family income. It may have been popular electorally, but in policy terms it’s got “ugly” written all over it. The government could have implemented this through the OSAP system by just cutting cheques to student aid recipients. But no: somebody

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Enough About National Goals, Already

In any discussion of Canadian post-secondary education, you know you’re about to approach an impasse when someone starts blaming some real or imagined ill on the lack of “national goals” or the absence of a federal ministry of higher education. Honestly, who cares? The lack of a Department of Education until the Carter administration didn’t stop the U.S. from creating one of the world’s great PSE systems. Our lack of one hasn’t prevented us from having world-class research funding or

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