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Category: Students

The Heinous Difficulty in Understanding What Works

The empirical consensus on the question of barriers to access in Canadian education is pretty clear: and among those few secondary school graduates who don’t go on to post-secondary education, affordability is very much a secondary issue (not non-existent, but secondary). The primary issue is that most of these young people don’t feel very motivated by the idea of spending more years in a classroom. It’s a vicious circle: these students don’t identify with education, so they don’t work at

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February 29, 2012 2 Comments

Looking Like You Care About Undergraduates

In our annual Globe Survey, we ask students to describe, using an 11-point scale, the extent to which their school is geared towards serving graduate students or undergraduates. As you’d expect, undergraduates tend to be slightly more satisfied (y-axis) with their schools the more undergraduate they perceive it to be. It’s not a huge effect, and it’s presumably correlated to some degree with size, but it’s there. Figure 1: Satisfaction as a Function of Perceived Grad-centricness What’s really interesting, though,

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February 24, 2012 No Comments

Best and Worst Student Experiences

Most of you know that we at HESA do the data collection and analysis for the Globe and Mail’s Canadian University Report. But what we do with that data is much more than just gives scores to each institution. We also spend a lot of our time mining that data for all its worth, looking for insight into the student experience (and not just on those miserable Toronto students). Today we’d like to look at how students describe their best

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February 22, 2012 1 Comment

Fibs, Nose-stretchers and Trolls

Can someone please make the Glen Murray v. CFS bunfight stop? It’s making me want to poke my eyes out with knitting needles. To recap, the Ontario Liberals made a stupid election promise about tuition rebates which they first communicated badly and then partially reneged on while pretending they hadn’t. Still, they did something for students, and would like some credit for it. But they are being rebuffed by the Canadian Federation of Students. The Federation is incandescent that the Liberals

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February 6, 2012 2 Comments

Distinct Missions

Why are Canadian universities so scared of acting differently from one another?  Why does no one want a niche? I’m not just talking about their cookie-cutter mission statements here, which seem to involve adding the words “research” and “excellence” to the output of a random word generator. I’m talking about the cookie-cutter ways they go about their daily business. In marketing-speak: they have little or no brand personality. It’s not as though cool niche missions are that hard to dream

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January 25, 2012 No Comments

One Thought to Start Your Day

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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