Tag: Work-Integrated Learning

Curricular Change and The Decline of Poland

Sometimes Canadian universities drive me up the wall.  Mostly, it’s when they start lobbying for other people to take action in areas where the clearest problems lie within their own wheelhouse.  I speak in particular of Study Abroad and Work-Integrated Learning.  To be clear, I am all for more study abroad and more work-integrated learning. They’re both straight-up great ideas.  But it seems to me that if you’re going out to lobby for money to improve something, you might want to

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HoC Finance Committee Report: the Oys Have It

Yesterday I riffed on the possibility of a Skills Budget. Today I want to focus on some early clues about what’s in the upcoming budget by parsing last month’s pre-budget consultation report of the House of Commons Finance Committee. To put this in some kind of context: a Finance Committee report may bear no resemblance whatsoever to the final budget project.  Basically, the chair of the finance committee (currently PEI’s Wayne Easter) takes dictation from the Finance Minister with respect to

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Work-Integrated Learning: We Can Do Better

You may have seen that late last week, the Business Higher Education Roundtable (BHER) rounded up a number of big names from colleges, universities and businesses to sign a letter to Finance Bill Morneau calling for the development of a National Work-Integrated Learning (WIL) Strategy as part of the 2019 Budget.  What should we make of this? On the one hand, it is certainly a sign that lots of people are taking WIL seriously.  And that’s a good thing.  Canada is

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Why Companies Value(d) Higher Education

I recently read the book A Perfect Mess: the Unlikely Ascendancy of American Higher Education by David Larabee.  It’s very good – in fact, the first two chapters are for my money the best short history of pre-1900 American higher education ever written.  I’m going to refer to this book a few times over the next couple of weeks.  But today, I want to talk about an engaging little passage he penned about how business came to view college (that is, American

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Universal co-op, Minister? You first.

Back in June here in Ontario, the Premier’s Highly Skilled Workforce Expert Panel released its final report. One of the recommendations was that every Ontario high school and university student should have at least one mandatory co-op experience (i.e., once in high school, once in university college).  In a statement in the provincial legislature, the Minister of Advanced Education and Skills Development Deb Matthews essentially said she liked the recommendation and would be working in the coming months to figure out

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