Category: Students

Student Health (part 1)

I have been perusing a quite astonishingly detailed survey that was recently released regarding student health.  Run by the American College Health Association-National College Health Assessment, this multi-campus exercise has been run twice now in Canada – once in 2013 and once in 2016.  Today, I’m going to look at what the 2016 results say, which are interesting in and of themselves.  Tomorrow, I’m going to look at how the data has changed since 2013 and why I think some claims

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Information vs Guidance

I’ve been working a lot lately on two big projects that touch on the issue of secondary school guidance.  The first is a large project for the European Commission on admission systems across Europe and the second is one of HESA’s own projects looking at how students in their junior year of high school process information about post-secondary education (the latter is a product for sale – drop us a line at info@higheredstrategy.com if you’re an institution interested in insights in how

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“Xenophobia”

Here’s a new one: the Canadian Federation of Students has decided, apparently, that charging international students higher tuition fees is “xenophobic”.  No, really, they have.  This is possibly the dumbest idea in Canadian higher education since the one about OSAP “profiting” from students.   But as we’ve seen all too often in the past year or two, stupidity is no barrier to popularity where political ideas are concerned.  So: let’s get down to debunking this. The point that CFS – and

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Four Megatrends in International Higher Education: Massification

A few months ago I was asked to give a presentation about my thoughts on the “big trends” affecting international education. I thought it might be worth setting some of these thoughts to paper (so to speak), and so, every Friday for the next few weeks I’ll be looking one major trend in internationalization, and exploring its impact on Canadian PSE. The first and most important mega-trend is the fact that all over the world, participation in higher education is

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Two (Relatively) Good News Studies

A quick summary of two studies that came out this week which everyone should know about. Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) On Tuesday, the results for the 2015 PISA tests were released.  PISA is, of course, that multi-country assessment of 15 year-olds in math, science and reading which takes place every three years and is managed by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).  PISA is not a test of curriculum knowledge (in an international context that would

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