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Category: Students

The Changing Median Student

Unless you’ve been in some sort of cave for the last decade, you’ve probably heard conversations about students, which begin with the phrase, “Today’s students are… less engaged/less able to write/weaker at math/not as curious/not as academically inclined…”  The obvious question of “compared to when” is usually left unanswered, and depends to some extent on the age of the person doing the kvetching; solipsistically, I always assume they’re talking about 25 years ago (when I started university). Usually, the implication

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November 26, 2013 5 Comments

How Domestic Students Experience Internationalization on Campus

So today, my colleague Jaqueline Lambert and I released a paper on how Canadian students view the process of internationalization (you can download the paper here).  It’s a mixed bag, frankly. On the one hand, we find pretty clearly that students buy into the principles of internationalization.  They are very positive about the goals internationalization is meant to foster (diversity, more global awareness), and they’re even enthused about how an increased presence of foreign students improves their schools’ prestige.  Over forty percent

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October 24, 2013 2 Comments

The Best CFS Chair Ever

I see Brad Lavigne has a new book out about his years as Jack Layton’s campaign strategist.  Time perhaps to mention his other big accomplishment: namely, being the best Chairperson the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) ever had. The mid-1990s were an ugly time in Canadian PSE.  Federal and provincial governments were broke, and cutting back everywhere.  Partly as a result of this, the student movement polarized – a more left-wing leadership took over the organization and purged the moderates,

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October 23, 2013 2 Comments

PIAAC: The Results for Aboriginal and Immigrant Canadians

One of the unbelievably cool things about this week’s PIAAC release is the degree to which StatsCan and CMEC have gone the extra mile to not only oversample for every province, but also for every territory (a first, to my knowledge), and for Aboriginal populations, as well – although they were not able to include on-reserve populations in their sample.  This allows us to take some truly interesting looks at several vulnerable sub-segments of the population. Let’s start with the Aboriginal population. 

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October 11, 2013 3 Comments

The Neo-Soviet View of Education and the Labour Market

Recently, I had a conversation with someone in the trucking industry who argued that the phenomenon of Arts grads working minimum wage jobs while trucking companies were having problems hiring people at $30/hour was prima facie evidence for a “skills mismatch” for which the education system was responsible.  Seriously.  Turns out that a lot of people – including a hell of a lot of people in government from all political stripes – seem to think that a “skills mismatch” is

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August 12, 2013 1 Comment

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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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