On the off chance you’re wandering through the halls of academia (non-COVID halls, anyway) and feel like picking a fight with another wanderer, the best advice I can give you is to use these three words: “students” “are” “customers”. See? Half of you probably want to fight me right now. But what I want to argue today is that while there are circumstances where that three-word statement is untrue, for the most part it is not untrue in the way
A few weeks ago, Statistics Canada released a paper profiling graduates of community colleges who already held bachelor’s degrees. A significant number of these were graduates of foreign universities – immigrants who came to the country with a degree and then found they needed a Canadian credential. But there were also a substantial number – fully 8% of all college graduates – who already had a degree from a Canadian university. In the 1990s, when colleges first started pointing out this
I see some institutions are starting to make decisions about the Fall 2021 term. Warning: my take is probably going to upset some people. But for reasons I will describe below, I believe very strongly that Canadian PSE institutions will likely look ridiculous if they do anything other than a near-complete return to in-person teaching for the fall. I know, I know, I was one of the voices pushing ultra-caution last year. And I know, people feel like it’s still
This week, in between negotiating computer crashes, dealing with angry university finance people and the usual grind, I managed to read a new book on the history of university teaching in the United States called The Amateur Hour by Jonathan Zimmerman. It is pretty innovative in its way: there are histories of higher education in abundance, but most of them end up being histories of institutions (or institutional types), or sociological histories of the student body, or whatever: focussing on what was
Written in collaboration with Michael Sullivan Good morning, all. Today’s blog is a collaboration with my colleague Michael Sullivan at the Strategic Counsel (with whom we at HESA Towers have been doing some joint projects over the past year or so) and it’s about the results of a new recently completed survey, which looks at students’ learning experiences since the start of this academic year. It’s an interesting half-full half-empty story, but with some very important future implications. Figure 1
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