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Category: Students

Consumerism Dragging Down Student Achievement? Not so Fast

So, there was an interesting article from Studies in Higher Education making the rounds on social media yesterday. Written by a trio of UK researchers, the article is entitled “The Student-as-Consumer Approach in Higher Education and its Effects on Academic Performance”, and is – miraculously – available ungated, here. The short version is that students who have a consumerist attitude towards education tend to have lower academic performance. For those who bewail the encroachment of consumerist attitudes in higher education,

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February 18, 2016 1 Comment

The Inter-Generational Equity Thing

I see that one of my favourite student groups, the Ontario Undergraduate Student Association (OUSA), has come out in favour of a tuition freeze.  Fair enough; not many students endorse fee increases, after all.  But the stated rationale for wanting one is a bit disappointing – mixing, as it does, poor historical analysis with poor generational politics. Here’s their thinking: In 1980, student contributions to university operating budgets in Ontario, which include tuition and fees, were only 18 per cent. In 2014, accounting

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January 20, 2016 2 Comments

Political/Economic Risk and International Student Recruitment

A couple of big events occurred internationally over the last few weeks, which will matter to folks in the international recruitment field.  Briefly, they are: 1) The Saudis are pulling back.  Things are moderately bad in the kingdom right now.  Their gambit of driving down the price of oil in order to run the American fracking industry out of business is not working as quickly as they hoped, and may have re-established an era of cheap, $50 (or sub-$50) oil for the foreseeable future. (And

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January 15, 2016 No Comments

Yoga

Many of you may have already seen this piece from the Guardian last week entitled “My students have paid £9,000 and now they think they own me”.  The details are obviously England-specific, but it’s basically a riff on that oft-heard complaint: if the cost of education gets too high, and students start thinking of themselves as – shock, horror – consumers, then higher education is definitely dead, bring back the dark ages, etc., etc. Now, without denying that there are probably some students who

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January 13, 2016 12 Comments

Kids These Days

I’ve had a few people ask me in recently: “what’s going on with students these days?”  Or words to that effect.  Although they don’t say so explicitly – they assume I know what they mean – what they are talking about is (in no particular order): that Atlantic article from a couple of months ago about intellectually-coddled students, the imbroglio at Yale, and the highly amusing Yogapocalyspe at the University of Ottawa. The line people seem to have these days

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November 27, 2015 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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