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Tag: Employment

Unit of Analysis

The Globe carried an op-ed last week from Ken Coates and Douglas Auld, who are writing a paper for the MacDonald Laurier institute on the evaluation of Canadian post-secondary institutions. At one level, it’s pretty innocuous (“we need better/clearer data”) but at another level I worry this approach is going to take us all down a rabbit hole. Or rather, two of them. The first rabbit hole is the whole “national approach” thing. Coates and Auld don’t make the argument

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September 21, 2016 2 Comments

The Future of Work (and What it Means for Higher Education), Part 2

Yesterday we looked at a few of the hypotheses out there about how IT is destroying jobs (particularly: good jobs).  Today we look at how institutions should react to these changes. If I were running an institution, here’s what I’d do: First, I’d ask every faculty to come up with a “jobs of the future report”.  This isn’t the kind of analysis that makes sense to do at an institutional level: trends are going to differ from one part of the

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January 28, 2016 6 Comments

The Future of Work (and What it Means for Higher Education), Part 1

Back in the 1990s when we were in a recession, Jeremy Rifkin wrote a book called The End of Work, which argued that unemployment would remain high forever because of robots, information technology, yadda yadda, whatever.  Cue the longest peacetime economic expansion of the century. Now, we have a seemingly endless parade of books prattling on about how work is going to disappear: Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s The Second Machine Age, Martin Ford’s Rise of the Robots, Jerry Kaplan’s Humans Need not Apply, Susskind and Susskind’s The Future of the Professions: How Technology will Transform

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January 27, 2016 2 Comments

Some Basically Awful Graduate Outcomes Data

Yesterday, the Council of Ontario Universities released the results of the Ontario Graduates’ Survey for the class of 2012.  This document is a major source of information regarding employment and income for the province’s university graduates.  And despite the chipperness of the news release (“the best path to a job is still a university degree”), it actually tells a pretty awful story when you do things like, you know, place it in historical context, and adjust the results to account

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September 2, 2015 12 Comments

Five Questions for Ken Coates

So, Ken Coates of the University of Saskatchewan published a paper the week before last arguing that there were too many university students and not enough trades students, so we should reduce university enrolments by a third and what the hell is wrong with kids today anyway?  Despite being not much more than a warmed-over version of the paper he co-authored with Rick Miner in IRPP a couple of years ago, it got some attention because it played directly into both

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April 13, 2015 6 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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