Until a couple of years ago, Emma Thompson thought she would study theatre or music in university. She had been involved in musical theatre and decided to attend a specialized Toronto arts high school.
But in grade 11, a physics teacher sparked her interest in science. He helped her look for summer internships and choose the kind of high-school courses top engineering or science programs would require. So this fall, Ms. Thompson applied to half a dozen such university programs and is now waiting to hear which have accepted her. Already, Ryerson University has offered early admission.
One of my doctoral students just got a tenure-track assistant professorship. That’s excellent for her, but a decade ago, it wouldn’t have rated mention in a newspaper column. Of course, that was before the amount of tenure-track openings dropped like a barometer during hurricane season. Today, getting a tenure-track position feels more like a "Man Bites Dog" event.
During that same period, undergraduate enrollment at American colleges and universities continued to rise — as it has for decades. Clearly more and more students need to be taught, so where have all the teaching jobs gone?They’ve gone to the same people who have been doing a lot of our undergraduate teaching all along: contingent faculty members, meaning graduate students and adjuncts. That’s not exactly news to anyone who has been watching the faculty labor market — or to the graduate students doing so much of the work. In the humanities, we’ve seen nontenure-track jobs (NTTs) multiply year after year. As David Laurence of the Modern Language Association has shown in PowerPoint talks he’s given on the subject, the proportion of faculty jobs that are tenured and tenure-track has been dropping steadily over the past two generations.
Queen’s University will strengthen its international reputation by emphasizing what has built its enviable national reputation, namely the transformative student learning experience it delivers within a research-intensive environment. The overarching goal of the university’s Strategic Framework (2014-2019) is to support Queen’s vision as Canada’s quintessential balanced academy.2
Internationalization is one of the four strategic drivers of the Strategic Framework, which builds upon the university’s Academic Plan and Strategic Research Plan.
Universities are intensely human places and are not immune from the worst impulses of human nature; and while violent incidents on university campuses may belie the ideal of the quad as a place of calm reflection and civil discussion, such incidents take place.
The Ministry’s consultation paper speaks to the risk of violence in the education sector, the sector in which the 15,000 professors and academic librarians we represent work.
Administrators at many colleges and universities have had online courses at their institutions for many years, now. One of the hidden challenges about online courses is that they tend to be observed and evaluated far less frequently than their face-to-face course counterparts. This is party due to the fact that many of us administrators today never taught online courses ourselves when we were teaching. This article provides six "secrets" to performing meaningful observations and evaluations of online teaching,
including how to use data analytics, avoid biases, and produce useful results even if observers have never taught online themselves.
Total student debt in Canada has risen by 6.2 per cent a year over the last 10 years to $42.9 new study by research company Strategic Insight.
A lot of that debt, the report says, can be blamed on parents who have spent so much money they don't have enough to save for their children's college or university fund.
Debt may actually be an intergenerational problem, says Strategic Insight's senior managing director, Carlos Cardone.
"There is almost like a spillover effect," said Cardone.
"Families are dealing with more debt, and as a consequence of that, they may not have the capacity to save all the money they would like to save for things like education."
This article contributes to the leterature on how teachers learn on the job and how schools and districts can support teaching learning to improve student learn ing and incorpirate changing standards and curricular materials into instructional practices.
When the enrolment numbers came in, Joanna’s heart sank.
The new program she had spent years developing and campaigning for had finally launched this year. Since that initial announcement, she had spent what little free time she had helping the school’s marketing team get the word out and dreaming of the kind of numbers that would let her bring in a few other instructors to help teach the program.
Jenny: For much of the history of the Career Talk column, we’ve focused on faculty careers. But in the coming months, we are going to turn to a different topic, and explore the career paths and concerns of M.A.s, A.B.D.s, and Ph.D.s who opt for careers in campus administration.
Julie: Let’s start with the hiring process. How does it work? What application materials will you need? How is it different from a faculty search?
First, it’s important to understand that, while all colleges and universities have similar missions, they operate in very different ways. Administrative offices may have come into being organically or strategically. The same office — say, international programs — may report to university life at one institution but to the provost at another. When you start applying for a particular administrative position, it’s wise to figure out the office’s place within the institution because that will affect the way you write your letter and contextualize the job.
This paper explores whether bias arising from group work helps explain the gender promotion gap. Using data from conomists’ CVs, I test whether coauthored publications matter differently for tenure by gender. While solo-authored papers send a clear signal about one’s ability, coauthored papers do not provide specific information about each contributor’s skills. I find that women incur a penalty when they coauthor that men do not experience. This is most pronounced for women coauthoring with men and less pronounced the more women there are on a paper. A model shows that the bias documented here departs from
traditional discrimination models.
This report provides parliamentarians with an assessment of the current state of the Canadian labour market by examining labour market indicators relative to trend, trends in wages and compensation, and the evidence of labour shortages and
skills mismatches.
Overall, the Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) finds that most labour market indicators remain below trend, although continue to recover from the 2008-09 recession. The weakness in the labour market is also reflected in the modest growth in wages and compensation over the recovery. In an attempt to explain the continued weakness in the labour market, PBO examined indicators of labour shortages and skills mismatches but found little evidence in support of a national labour shortage or skills mismatch in Canada.
In the Fall of 2011, the Toronto School of Theology (TST) within the University of Toronto (UofT) underwent a rigorous quality assurance review of its academic programs by its theological accrediting agency in North America, the Association of Theological Schools (ATS). In all, twenty-one scholars from university-related or free-standing accredited theological institutions with an intimate knowledge of North American theological education—in teams of three, one for each of the six member-institutions of the Toronto School of Theology, and one for the TST consortium itself—strongly affirmed the quality of the programs, including the Doctor of Theology (ThD) research degree program.
Grounded and reliable measurement instruments grounded in theory are essential to move the field of servant leadership forward.
The Survey of First-Year University Students was co-ordinated by the Department of Housing and Student Life at the University of Manitoba and represents the fourth co-operative study of undergraduate education completed by The Canadian Undergraduate Survey Consortium. The nineteen universities participating in this year’s survey were Acadia University, Brandon University, Carleton University, Concordia University, Dalhousie University, Laurentian University, McMaster
University, Memorial University, Nipissing University, Queens University, Ryerson Polytechnic University, Simon Fraser University, St. Francis Xavier University, University of British Columbia, University of Lethbridge, University of Manitoba, University of Ottawa, University of Waterloo, and Wilfrid Laurier University.
With what confidence can we guarantee that graduates are ready for the challenges of 21st-century life, work, and citizenship? For years I have worked with district leaders to help principals, teacher coaches, and so many other educators build credibility, coherence, and community around their education transformation efforts. District leaders must manage a myriad of priorities, and I often tell them that the best first step they can take to ensure our students’ success in life, work, and citizenship is to develop and adopt a graduate profile.
Here’s a reality many business leaders confront at some point: corporate cultures can eat innovation strategies for breakfast.
The inertia and siloing that can settle into any workplace can be antithetical to the boldness and flexibility required to drive innovation. So, what realistically can be accomplished?
Large organizations typically try to be more innovative by setting up initiatives outside the “mothership,” with mixed results. (Many large teaching hospitals, for example, have adopted this approach). By spurring innovation outside the organization, companies might be able to create incremental change and innovation, but they could have difficulty leveraging these wins in the larger company culture. General Mills, Nestle and Pepsi recently went through experiments with outside incubators, with mixed results. Despite the uncertain evidence, we’re at a tipping point
where if you’re not linked to an incubator, your business is seen as falling behind.
Is there a tipping point at which students who take a blend of online and in-person coursework are doing too much online? That question goes to the heart of something called the online paradox.
The online paradox has inspired much debate, and it describes two seemingly contradictory things. The first is
that community-college student who take an online course are more likely to fail than are those who take it face-to-face. The second is that community-college students who take some online classes are more likely to complete their
degrees than are those who don’t take any.
Fifty-three years ago, a Progressive Conservative education minister unleashed what is still the most significant transformation of higher education in Ontario. Bill Davis pushed legislation to create the community college system, which diversified the provision of education and training and laid the foundation for the dramatic expansion of postsecondary access that has
made Ontario a leader in educational attainment internationally.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford and his cabinet were sworn in on Friday, June 29, and many in the higher education community are wondering what this new government will bring to the sector. Wherever they fall in the political spectrum, however, no one is holding their breath in anticipation of big ideas or transformative change.
How can Canada encourage more postsecondary students to study abroad?
Employers and higher ed institutions have acknowledged the value that this type of experience could bring to the country’s workforce. But only 3.1% of full-time university students and 1.1% of full-time college students have studied abroad as part
of their postsecondary education.
On Monday, scientists published a study in Nature Genetics that analyzed the genes of 1.1 million people of European ancestry, including over 300,000 23andMe customers. Over 99 percent of our DNA is identical in all humans, but researchers focused on the remaining 1 percent and found thousands of DNA variants that are correlated with educational attainment. This information can be combined into a single number, called a polygenic score. – “Why Progressives Should Embrace the Genetics of Education” by Dr. Kathryn Paige Harden in the New York Times, July 24, 2018.
It’s that word “score” that made my heart sink a little. We love us some scores in education. SAT scores, NAEP scores, AP scores, GPA, IQ, and now here we have our “polygenic score for educational attainment.”