Tag: Student Surveys

Why Are We Applauding Statscan’s Lack of Strategic Focus?

Remember about twenty months ago when everyone was gaga over the idea that the feds were going to pay for an expanded version of the faculty survey? And there would be data on part-timers!  And on equity criteria!   And maybe community colleges too! Of course it was never clear that this would achieve anything like what its supporters claimed (mainly because it’s not clear how many profs are prepared to have certain personal data on things like race and disability recorded by

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Measuring Teaching Quality

The Government of Ontario, in its ongoing quest to try to reform its funding formula, continues to insist that one element of the funding formula needs to relate to the issue of “teaching quality” or “quality of the undergraduate experience”.  Figuring out how to do this is of course a genuine puzzle. There are some of course who believe that quality can only be measured in terms of inputs (i.e. funding) and not through outputs (hi, OCUFA!)  Some like the

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Stories Arts Faculties Tell Themselves

Here at HESA towers, we’ve been doing some work on how students make decisions about choosing a university (if you’re interested: the Student Decisions Project was a multi-wave, qualitative, year-long longitudinal study that tracked several hundred Grade 12 students as they went through the PSE research, application, and enrolment process.  We also took a more targeted qualitative look, specifically at Arts, with the national Prospective Arts Students Survey).  We’ve been trying to do the same for colleges, but it’s a

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What Canadians Think About Universities, and Where Canadian Universities Want To Go

A couple of quick notes about two interesting things from Universities Canada this week. The first is the release of some public opinion polling, which they commissioned in the spring, regarding universities and other forms of higher education.  You can see the whole thing here, but I want to highlight a couple of slides, in particular. The first is this one:                   It seems Canadians are overwhelmingly positive about most post-secondary institutions

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Free the Satellites

The University of Toronto has a problem (several, actually, but I’m trying to keep these short).  And the problem is that if you’re not actually at U of T, and someone says “U of T”, what do you think of?  The answer, of course, is the St. George campus: that big and occasionally beautiful hunk of land East of Queen’s Park, College, and Bloor. But what about the other two campuses? It’s easy to forget about the Scarborough and Mississauga

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