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Tag: Ontario

Re-thinking “First-Generation” Students

Back when the McGuinty government was still working out what it wanted to do in higher education, it made a commitment about making progress in access for four key groups: aboriginal students, students with disabilities, francophone students and “first-generation” students. Two of these were unquestionably sensible. Anything that helps Aboriginal students is a Good Thing. Of course, there are some enormous differences in the barriers faced by, say, Aboriginal students from Toronto and people from fly-in First Nations communities that

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November 2, 2012 2 Comments

Credit Transfer Agreements

Minor buzz earlier this week about a credit-transfer agreement between seven universities in Ontario. According to the press release, Queen’s, McMaster, Western and the Universities of Toronto, Ottawa, Waterloo and Guelph have agreed to full recognition of each others’ first-year university credit. While credit mobility generally is a Good Thing, this specific announcement puzzled me a bit. How is this actually new? Back in 1995, the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada introduced the “Pan-Canadian protocol on the Transferability of University Credits,” which

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September 28, 2012 No Comments

Embrace and Contain

One of the reasons that Canadian universities have such an astonishing level of freedom from government oversight – particularly in Ontario – is that our university presidents have over the years achieved absolute mastery of the art of “embrace and contain.” Devotees of Yes, Minister, will know what I’m talking about. “Minister,” Sir Humphrey would say, “I am fully seized of your aims and will do my utmost to put them into practice.” This, of course, was code for saying that

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September 18, 2012 No Comments

Worst Back-to-School Article, 2012 Edition

Carol Goar from the Toronto Star, take a bow. Your article “Ontario students paying more but getting less” wins my vote as the most facile, ill-informed article of la rentrée. The article contains two basic screw-ups which merit the award. First, the “paying more” bit. Her contention is that the average tuition fee has risen $4182 since when Mike Harris was elected. The figure is correct, but unadjusted for inflation. When you actually compare apples to apples – as any first-year econ

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September 10, 2012 1 Comment

Research Rankings: Burning Questions

We understand that some results from our research rankings are causing some head-scratching. We thought we’d give you some insight into some of the key puzzles. Q: Why isn’t U of T first? U of T is always first. The fact that we didn’t include medical research is a big reason; had we done so, the results might have been quite different. But part of it also is that Toronto’s best subjects tend to be ones with high research costs and high

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August 30, 2012 4 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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