One of the best – and yet perhaps most confusing – ways to look at the current state of today’s students is to look at the Canadian version of the National College Health Assessment (NCHA) survey, which is done every three years. I want to take you through a quick comparison of the 2013 and 2019 surveys (each of which were taken by tens of thousands of Canadian students, so it’s a good sample), because I think there is a
One of the things that marks out Canadian student unions from their counterparts in (say) the UK is the relative lack of emphasis unions put on advocacy relating to academic quality. For any student unions that want to change that, the next couple of weeks would be an unprecedented opportunity to do so. The remote semester has created a fundamental pickle for institutions, one which is baked very deeply into the fabric of Canadian academia. Namely, while universities have the responsibility of attracting
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
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
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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