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Category: Students

How Families Make PSE Choices

Over the last few months at HESA Towers we’ve been doing a lot of interviews of parents of grade 12 students, to help understand what it is that shapes and shifts their perceptions of higher education institutions.  I can’t give away much of the content here (that’s for paying customers), but one issue I do think is worth a mention is what we’re finding about how families make decisions about post-secondary education. The way researchers conceive of decision-making in post-secondary

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September 20, 2017 1 Comment

Two Approaches to Student Success

I’ve recently been doing a little bit of work recently on student success and I am struck by the fact that there are two very different approaches to student success, depending on which side of the Atlantic you are sitting on.  I’m not sure one is actually better than the other, but they speak to some very different conceptions of where student success happens within an institution. (To be clear, when I say “student success” I mostly mean “degree/program completion”.  I recognize that there

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June 14, 2017 5 Comments

National Patterns of Student Housing

The other day I published a graph on student housing in Canada and the United States that seemed to grab a lot of people’s attention.  It was this one: Figure 1: Student Living Arrangements, Canada vs. US People seemed kind of shocked by this and wondered what causes the differences.  So I thought I’d take a shot at answering this. (caveat: remember, this is data from a multi-campus survey and I genuinely have no idea how representative this is of the student

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June 7, 2017 3 Comments

Student Health (Part 3)

You know how it is when someone tries to make a point about Canadian higher education using data from American universities? It’s annoying.  Makes you want to (verbally) smack them upside the head. Canada and the US are different, you want to yell. Don’t assume the data are the same! But of course the problem is there usually isn’t any Canadian data, which is part of why these generalizations get started in the first place. Well, one of the neat

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June 5, 2017 2 Comments

Student Health (part 2)

Now you may have seen a headline recently talking about skyrocketing mental health problems among students.  Specifically, this one from the Toronto Star, which says, among other things: A major survey of 25,164 Ontario university students by the American College Health Association showed that between 2013 and 2016, there was a 50-per-cent increase in anxiety, a 47-per-cent increase in depression and an 86-per-cent increase in substance abuse. Suicide attempts also rose 47 per cent during that period. That’s a pretty stunning set of

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June 2, 2017 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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