Category: Students

Hit Pause

All right, everyone.  It’s the solstice today, and that’s pretty much the signal for everyone to press the pause button and wind things down for the summer.  This blog is no exception.  I’ll be back on August 26th, unlikely to be rested (packed schedule for the summer already), but hopefully recharged and for another year of data analysis, global updates and snark in roughly equal proportion (the way you all like it, right?) When I do these end-of-term things, I

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Student Affairs

I spent a couple of days out in Calgary this week at the annual meeting of Canadian Association of University & College Student Services (CACUSS).  I had not been to one of these in quite awhile – long enough ago that the meetings could be held on a campus and not in a convention centre – and I was intrigued at some of the changes that seem to have taken place in these occupations, which I suspect reflect some significant

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Danger Ahead

Canadian universities and colleges like to congratulate themselves for their enormous success in increasing international student enrolments over the past few years.  And why not?  That success has brought Canadian institutions billions of dollars and allowed them to make up for roughly a decade of domestic tuition fee controls and stagnant core provincial funding. We have told ourselves a lot of stories over the last few years about why we have been so successful.  Many of them have to do

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The May Fourth Movement

Tomorrow is the fourth of May.  In North America, this day has jokingly become known as “Star Wars Day” (i.e. “May the Fourth Be With You”).  But in China, it has a very different meaning.  For it was one hundred years ago tomorrow that one of the most important students revolts of all time began. China held together just barely after the Qing dynasty was deposed in 1911.  By outmaneuvering Sun Yat-Sen and (it is widely believed) assassinating Song Jiaoren,

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Fun with Ontario Application Data

Every year or two, it’s fun to play with Ontario applications data (it would be fun to play with applications data from the rest of the country, too, but Ontario is the only place that actually aggregates it, so hold your hot-takes on upper-Canada-centricness).  And, it turns out, there are a lot of quite interesting stories. Let’s start with the programs of study.  The Ontario University Applications Centre modified its program categories a couple of years ago, so to look

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