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Category: Students

Summer’s Over, New Sources of Exhaustion on the Way

Morning all.  The good news is: the blog is back!  The bad news is: that means summer’s over.  My apologies. Not that “summer” has been more than a vague reference to warmer temperatures this year.  Instead of a mixture of research and downtime, what we’ve had this summer is – for most, anyway – an all-out effort to make a semester (fingers crossed) of remote teaching workable.  The aggregate sum of all these incredible efforts is a remote semester that might not be

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August 31, 2020 1 Comment

The Follies of Technological Determinism

One of the most enraging things about people doing drive-by takes on higher education is their insistence on focussing on the “implications of technology” rather than looking at consumer demand.  This month’s example comes to us from the Research Department of the Royal Bank of Canada and their piece entitled The Future of Post-Secondary Education: On Campus, Online and In Demand. The piece is a little uneven, in the sense that it mixes grand pronouncements about the future of higher education

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June 11, 2020 No Comments

How to Answer Questions About WIL

Yesterday, I looked at some reasons why WIL works.  Today, I would like to talk about how we might answer larger questions about the extent to which WIL works (or, more accurately, what the impacts of individual aspects of WIL experiences look like). The case for WIL “working” in terms of labour market outcomes largely rests on data for co-op placements, and then kind of assuming that WIL is “co-op lite” (which is sort of true, sometimes). C.D. Howe Institute’s

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June 10, 2020 2 Comments

Why Does WIL Work?

A friend of mine asked me a deceptively simple question the other day: “why does Work-Integrated Learning (WIL) work”?”   What are the possible reasons that students with WIL experiences do better than others in common outcomes such as “higher starting salaries” or “faster transition to full-time work” (take your pick)?  This is a really good question because the answer is nowhere near as straightforward as you might think. One possible answer – the one that seems to be popular in Ottawa these

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June 9, 2020 1 Comment

WIL is the Way

One of the lasting impacts of the COVID virus is going to be the destruction it has wrought in the youth labour market.  There are two main problems: first, the virus has most strongly affected the tourist and service industries in which students most commonly find work, and second, the recession is inevitably going to play havoc with the kinds of entry level jobs that young graduates normally get.  What should universities and colleges do? Simple: double down on work-integrated

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June 1, 2020 1 Comment

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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