In eastern parts of the country, if you use the words “the three best universities in Canada”, they look at you slightly oddly. They know you mean U of T and McGill, but they’re not 100% sure who the third one is. “UBC?” they ask, uncertainly. This is pure eastern myopia. Today, I will advance the proposition that by most measures, UBC is substantially ahead of McGill, and is in fact the country’s #2 university. Let’s start with some statistics
There’s a line I hear every once in awhile from profs (mainly, but not exclusively, in the humanities) saying something to the effect of: their job is not to prepare students for the world of work; rather, they want to prepare students’ minds to be critical thinkers or better citizens, or something like that. Actually, it’s usually phrased less delicately, like: “I’m not preparing kids to be cannon fodder for the knowledge economy”; “I don’t give a damn what employers think, I
One question that always comes up (or should come up, anyway) in discussions of university branding and positioning is: “how different is our institution, really”? Well, for a few years, when we ran the Globe and Mail Canadian University Report survey, we used to ask students questions that would allow us to see how different students thought their university was. The results were… interesting. We asked students to locate their institution on an 11-point double-ended scale. Did they think their institution was
Today, we at HESA released a paper called: Moving On? How Students Think About Choosing a Place to Live After Graduation, which is based on a 2011 survey of 1,859 students from across the country. Obviously, you should go read the whole thing, but for the time-pressed here are the highlights: 1) Part of the paper’s purpose is to examine the qualities students look for in a place to live. Turns out Richard Florida’s whole shtick about young educated types looking for cities
One of the main struggles with measuring performance in higher education – whether of departments, faculties, or institutions – is how to measure the quality of teaching. Teaching does not go entirely unmeasured in higher education. Individual courses are rated by students through course evaluation surveys, which occur at the end of each semester. The results of these evaluations do have some bearing on hiring, pay, and promotion (though how much bearing varies significantly from place to place), but these data
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