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Category: Students

Preparing Students for the Workforce

There’s a line I hear every once in awhile from profs (mainly, but not exclusively, in the humanities) saying something to the effect of: their job is not to prepare students for the world of work; rather, they want to prepare students’ minds to be critical thinkers or better citizens, or something like that.  Actually, it’s usually phrased less delicately, like: “I’m not preparing kids to be cannon fodder for the knowledge economy”; “I don’t give a damn what employers think, I

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November 13, 2014 3 Comments

Where Do Students Want to Live?

Today, we at HESA released a paper called: Moving On?  How Students Think About Choosing a Place to Live After Graduation, which is based on a 2011 survey of 1,859 students from across the country.  Obviously, you should go read the whole thing, but for the time-pressed here are the highlights: 1)      Part of the paper’s purpose is to examine the qualities students look for in a place to live.  Turns out Richard Florida’s whole shtick about young educated types looking for cities

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September 22, 2014 No Comments

Welcome to the Crisis

I just took a look at the new enrolment confirmation statistics for Ontario universities.  They are jaw-dropping. Overall, the system experienced its first fall in “number of confirmed enrolments from secondary school” since (I believe) the early 1990s (I say “I believe” because OUAC doesn’t have public stats that go that far back, but I think that’s right).  Ever since the double-cohort, the province’s universities have seen a steady annual 3% bump in total direct-entry enrolments.  That’s been the source

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September 17, 2014 2 Comments

Bad Memory

Some really sobering stuff in a paper I just got from Statscan called, “Job Market Realities for Post-Secondary Graduates”.  Listen to this: “Graduates of a field with low unemployment and little underemployment were also likely to earn high salaries and be content with their jobs.  They were usually graduates of job-oriented fields such as engineering, teacher training, most health disciplines, business, computer science and some technologies.” “A more general education in subjects with little practical application often (leads) to a

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June 2, 2014 No Comments

Why (Almost) Everyone Loves International Students (Part 2)

Yesterday, I showed how good international students were for universities’ bottom lines.  But it’s not quite as simple as I made it out to be.  Whether admitting international students makes sense or not depends on four factors: 1)      How much of the income do you get to keep?  In Quebec, international students in “regulated” programs (which include Arts) are worth essentially nothing to institutions because the government claws it all back.  On the other hand, in block-grant provinces (and in Saskatchewan,

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May 8, 2014 5 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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