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Category: Students

Beyond the Student Choice Initiative

Last Thursday, the Ontario Superior Court struck down the Ford Government’s “Student Choice Initiative”, a program of voluntary student-unionism (VSU) it imposed last January (see here for a refresher).  The court decision is here.  It’s a full defeat for the provincial government, the policy is declared void, but it’s unclear if and how student organizations will be compensated for lost revenue from the fall term. A lot of people are arguing this is a victory for student unions and for the cause of

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November 27, 2019 No Comments

Ontario Doubles Down on Dodgy Colleges

Remember about a month ago when I noted how several Ontario colleges now had international student numbers above 50% of total enrolment?  And about how in some cases this was being done by small town colleges establishing “partnerships” with private vocational colleges in the Greater Toronto Area?  How they were effectively warehousing international students at these locations, charging them full tuition, and paying the private college to teach some allegedly bespoke curriculum while pocketing the difference? Two pieces of news.

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November 18, 2019 2 Comments

Managing Class Sizes (Part 2)

Yesterday we covered some aspects of how to create small classes on a budget (mainly: pay for them by having a few big ones).  Today I want to delve into three other questions: are small classes actually better than large ones, can small classes be conjured up more cheaply, and what is the price we are all willing to pay for small classes? Let’s start with the question of the benefits of small classes.  There is a massive amount of

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September 19, 2019 No Comments

Managing Class Sizes (Part 1)

One of the things that many people misunderstand about higher education is the way the economics of classrooms actually work; in particular about the relationship between enrolments, teaching complements, teaching loads, and class sizes. Today and tomorrow, I want to tease these out a bit. For this post, let’s take a faculty with 100 professors, which admits 500 students per year and has 10% attrition per year, which translates to 1720 students total. That means it has a student-professor ratio

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September 18, 2019 1 Comment

Know Your Incoming Students (2019 edition)

It’s the start of the school year and that’s the best time to examine trends among incoming students. Fortunately for us, this is one of those subjects where Canada has decent public data on the subject, as the Canadian University Survey Consortium (CUSC) has been asking a (mostly) consistent set of questions to first-year students on a triennial basis since 2001. It’s not a perfect survey: consortium membership changes from cycle to cycle, so the base population is neither equal

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August 28, 2019 No Comments

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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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