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Category: Students

Good Lord Cape Breton

Last week, I got an email from the Atlantic Association of Universities.  “Great news!” it said.  “Enrollment in Atlantic Canadian universities rose by 2.4% last year!”  That’s pretty good, I thought to myself,  given the demographic crunch and all.  So, I clicked through on the document to get to where I can see the institution-by-institution data (I always do this, because it’s always good to see how your clients are doing.) Hm…OK, NSCAD up 8.3%, that’s good (guess our work

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October 22, 2018 No Comments

Affordability and Independence

There are two constructs that make it extremely difficult to talk sensibly about who should pay for higher education.  The first is “affordability” and the second is “independence”, in the sense of students’ independence from the rest of their family.  It’s worth exploring these concepts in detail to see how they complicate analysis Let’s start with affordability, a term which unfortunately has become equated with “accessibility”, which it clearly is not.  Simply put, “affordable” is something you can pay for. 

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September 14, 2018 No Comments

Time to Talk Teaching Assessments

Something very important happened over the summer: The Ryerson Faculty Union won its case against the university in Ontario Superior Court against the use of student teaching evaluations in tenure and promotion decisions (it was silent on merit pay, but I’m fairly sure that’s because Ryerson academics don’t have it – as legal precedent I’m 100% certain merit pay is affected, too).  This means literally every university in the country is going to have to re-think the evaluation of teaching

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September 10, 2018 3 Comments

Dissecting Student Protest and Politics

Following on the theme of yesterday’s blog on May ’68, I recently read a volume of papers edited by University of Surrey Professor Rachel Brooks called Student Politics and Protest: International perspectives (Research into Higher Education).  As with any volume of essays, the quality of the articles is uneven and it while doesn’t have quite the global reach of the late 60s works of Seymor Martin Lipset and Phillip Altbach (here and here), it still has a reasonably impressive scope and I think there are

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May 2, 2018 No Comments

May ’68 – May ’18?

It’s May First, the day when new student union executives typically take office in Canada.  But it’s also now exactly fifty years since the events of Mai ’68 in France, which was maybe the totemic moment for those who believe in a “student movement”.  In the United States, it was the year the anti-war movement really hit its stride (following the January Tet offensive), and where the image of student power hit its peak at the August 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.  In France,

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May 1, 2018 1 Comment

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