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Category: Students

Persuading High School Students

Over the years, a lot of people have surveyed incoming university students to find out why they chose a particular institution.  Most of these surveys contain a battery of questions about influencers: i.e. what were the sources of information that a student used to make their decision.  What researchers are looking for, usually, is some indication that school websites or career fairs or Maclean’s rankings or whatever are actually having some impact.  But year after year, students essentially give the

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November 23, 2016 2 Comments

Student Living Standards

Last month, a group called Meal Exchange, an inter-university student anti-hunger group, in collaboration with the Ryerson School of Social Work, published an interesting paper called Hungry for Knowledge: Assessing the Prevalence of Student Food Insecurity on Five Canadian Campuses.  People are mostly drawing the wrong conclusions from it, but it’s worth examining nonetheless. Meal Exchange surveyed 4500 students at five campus across Canada using a battery of questions on food purchase & consumption identical to those used in Statistics

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November 7, 2016 No Comments

Measuring the Effects of Study Abroad

In the higher education advocacy business, an unhappily large proportion of the research used is of the correlation = causation type.  For instance, many claim that higher education has lots of social benefits like lower crime rates and higher rates of community volunteering on the grounds that outcomes of graduates are better than outcomes of non-graduates in these areas.  But this is shaky.  There are very few studies which look at this carefully enough to eliminate selection bias – that

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September 13, 2016 1 Comment

Know Your Incoming Students (Part 1)

As the school year starts, it’s always valuable to take a look at trends in incoming students.  The best tool we have for that in Canada for doing this is the Canadian Undergraduate Survey Consortium’s triennial survey of first-year students (the most recent version is here.  It’s not the greatest of instruments: consortium membership changes from cycle to cycle, so the base population is neither equal to the national first-year population nor stable from cycle to cycle.  But since Statistics

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August 30, 2016 1 Comment

A National Day of Action

Earlier this week  Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) decided to hold a “National Day of Action”, its first since 2012.  Many may find this a bit puzzling: after all, this is a year in which the federal government increased student grants and doubled the number of summer student jobs (also, increased granting council funding and put aside gazillions for infrastructure, though that may matter less to students than to other post-secondary stakeholders).  So what, exactly, is CFS thinking? Well, I don’t have

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June 10, 2016 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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