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Category: Students

HEQCO’s Intriguing Skills Report

HEQCO produced a fascinating report on skills last week, which I want to explore in depth.  Unfortunately, it has put a few people’s backs up because of a couple of poorly-chosen sentences in a covering press release, which I will also explore.  But let’s focus on the first bit, because simply putting this study took an enormous amount of effort that needs to be acknowledged and celebrated. (Actually, they released two intriguing reports: one on literacy and numeracy and one on critical thinking. 

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December 4, 2018 1 Comment

Notes on Canada’s International Advantages (and Disadvantages)

During my brief trip to Asia, I spent a fair bit of time chatting with people who one way or another are in the international education business.  Two somewhat connected thoughts: Canadians Continue to be Not Very Good at the Whole International Campus Thing.   I spent a couple of days in Dubai, where there are now somewhere on the order of 100-odd institutions operating, a substantial portion of which are international.  The only “semi”- Canadian one is an outfit called

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November 14, 2018 1 Comment

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
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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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