I wrote about how usually, when it’s argued there is an “overproduction” of PhDs, “demand” for doctoral graduates is being implicitly defined by the number of tenure-stream jobs available while “overproduction” usually points to “not enough academic jobs for doctoral graduates.” So how do you define the demand for doctorates when we’re not just talking about faculty jobs anymore? I’d been thinking about this when I saw two recent articles from Brenda Brouwer, President of the Canadian Association for Graduate Studies (CAGS): one in University Affairs titled, “Canada needs more PhDs”—and a similar piece in the Globe and Mail, “Let’s end the myth that PhDs are only suited for the ivory tower”.
Students don’t always like working in groups. Ann Taylor, an associate professor of chemistry at Wabash College, had a class that was particularly vocal in their opposition. She asked for their top 10 reasons why students don’t want to work in groups and they offered this list (which I’ve edited slightly).
Background/Context: Despite burgeoning racial and ethnic heterogeneity within the United States, many students grow up in racially
homogeneous schools and neighborhoods. This lack of interracial interaction appears to play a substantial role in shaping students racial attitudes and world views upon entering college.
Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: The aim of the study was to examine the relationships among multiple forms of precollege exposure to racial/ethnic diversity and racial attitudes (e.g., perceptions of workplace discrimination) upon entering college.
This has been a very difficult year for Western. The issue of the President’s compensation and the move for votes of non-confidence at the university’s Senate in the spring deeply affected the community, including the members of the Board of Governors. As is so often the case when organizations face significant challenges, there is an opportunity to review governance policies and procedures and make them better. Over the course of this review, in addition to hearing criticisms and concerns, the Task Force heard a common refrain that we all need to work to make the university stronger. The Board is made up of dedicated individuals who believe in Western and share that interest. The members are committed to working with the Western community to address the concerns that have been raised about how governance is carried out at this institution and to develop practices and processes that will allow the Board and the many stakeholder groups that make up the university, to communicate with and understand each other better.
This report is only a first step. It outlines the concerns that were presented to the Task Force by members of the community and by members of the Board, and provides recommendations for moving forward. Some of those recommendations can be implemented relatively quickly; others will take time and effort. However, it is critical to persevere and to keep the conversation going.
The Task Force also recognizes that Senate is conducting its own review of governance. The Board looks forward to receiving their report and finding opportunities to work with Senate to improve governance at Western.
Canada seems perpetually fixated on the "knowledge economy," no matter the political stripes of the government in power. Budget 2017 will roll out the Innovation Agenda, where significant funds will be dedicated to supporting "super clusters" around the likes of aerospace, cyber security, or nanotechnology.
Policy-makers wish to prepare job markets for disruptions that will stem from automation, artificial intelligence, 3D printing, and the industrial internet. The skills for the future? If you believe the pundits, they are coding, sales talent, and everything digital. Is Canada's economy of the future a place where the skilled trades will survive, let alone thrive?
This paper examines whether intermediary bodies are useful in advancing government goals for quality and sustainability in higher education systems. It explores the evidence about intermediary bodies through case studies of England, Israel, New Zealand and the United States. It also treats the case of Ontario, whose best-known intermediary bodies have been the Ontario Council on University Affairs and the colleges’ Council of Regents.
People abused by angry discipline as children, may tend to abuse or overly punish other people or themselves for perceived wrongs in their adult lives. Passive and aggressive personality types are often attracted to each other. In some individuals, aggressive or passive personality traits may be genetically inherited. The aggressive personality may feel weakened by having guidelines or boundaries for anger. Anger is a normal human emotion, and these guidelines can help express anger in a healthy way:
Each year, many of us make New Year’s resolutions and try and keep them. Others, usually newspapers and media outlets, speculate on the key things to watch out for during the coming year. Rather than resolutions or predictions, we list ten developments we wish for online learning in 2016.
We hope these come true, but it will take clear resolution, firm commitment and lots of hard work by all to make them happen. This is why we refer to this as a “wish list”.
Not from the realm of pure speculation, all items in our list are developments from current practices in technology, learning, and public policy.
Research in commercial organizations has provided a multitude of examples on how leadership development can effectively foster employees’ performance and work-related attitudes such as commitment or satisfaction. In contrast, to date systematic leadership development is largely lacking for employees in higher education. However, we suggest that the positive effects of leadership development in commercial organizations also apply to the academic context. Thus, the purpose of this applied article is to present two approaches to the development of
leadership in higher education. More specifically, we provide a detailed description of two different programs offered to researchers at a large German university. The first program constitutes a leader development initiative for junior faculty on an individual level, whereas the second focuses on the development of leadership within university departments on a group level. We provide recommendations for establishing and evaluating effective leadership development in higher education.
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."
Rural and northern students face unique challenges in accessing post-secondary education. A rural student is a student who identifies as being from outside of the following urban centers: the Hamilton, Ottawa, London, Windsor, the Greater Toronto
Area, Niagara Region, Waterloo Region, Thunder Bay, and Sudbury. A northern student is a student who identifies as being from one of the following regional districts: Kenora, Rainy River, Thunder Bay, Cochrane, Algoma, Sudbury, Timiskaming, Nipissing,
Manitoulin, and Parry Sound.
Si nous sommes sérieux au sujet de l’apprentissage en ligne accessible, nous devons parler ouvertement du handicap comme si c’était ici, maintenant - parce que c’est le cas.
This report is part of a wider three-year program of research, ‘Vocations: the link between post-compulsory education and the labour market’, which is investigating the educational and occupational paths that people take and how their study relates to their work. It is specifically interested in exploring the transitions that students make in undertaking a second qualification (that is, whether they change field of education and/or move between the VET and higher education sectors). It also looks at the reasons why they decide to undertake another qualification.
The authors use a combination of data from the 2009 Australian Bureau of Statistics Survey of Education and Training and interviews with students and graduates, as well as managers, careers advisors, learning advisors, teachers and academics, to examine these transitions. The finance, primary, health and electrical trades/engineering industries are used as case studies.
Raise your hand if your salary increased by more than 50 per cent in the past five years. Nope? Didn’t think so.
But it could go up that much by September if you’re the president of a college in Ontario. Or maybe it will rise by a mere 39 per cent.
Whichever, you get the picture. As the end of a five-year wage freeze on non-unionized public sector workers approaches, the province’s 24 colleges are setting the stage for massive pay increases for their presidents.
Deb Matthews, the minister responsible for post-secondary education, needs to rein them in. Not only to stop a salary race at the college level, but to manage pay expectations for other public sector workers, including those at universities, hospitals, school boards and government agencies.
The extent of the college presidents’ pay ambitions are made clear in documents released by the Ontario Public Service Employees Union, which opposes the proposed new salary levels.
This paper seeks to address the systemic barriers that impact the ability of Aboriginal peoples to access, persist and succeed in post-secondary education. Given histories of discrimination and chronic underfunding of Aboriginal education at both the K-12 and post-secondary level, OUSA believes that action must be taken by all levels of government and institutions. This
is particularly pressing as recent figures have shown that the attainment gap for Aboriginal peoples1 may in fact be widening. OUSA affirms the importance of self-determination for Aboriginal peoples, and stresses that any policy intervention must be undertaken in direct partnership and consultation with Aboriginal communities.
Student success in post-secondary education is an ongoing concern, however, research has focused on relatively homogeneous university samples. Moreover, Canadian research on predictors of student success is limited. Following
recent trends, we examined non-cognitive, personal qualities, rather than cognitive predictors (e.g., IQ), of student success. Relying on a psychosocial model, we examined age, gender, perceived stress, maternal education, identity style, perseverance, and student engagement as predictors of student success in a multi-site sample of students attending a CEGEP in Quebec (N = 239; Mage = 18.6 years; 68.2% female) and a polytechnic school in Ontario (N = 209; Mage = 20.6 years; 71.3% female). Maternal education and perseverance emerged as significant predictors in both samples. Links between informational identity
and cognitive engagement and student success differed by location. Our findings suggest the need to focus on student perseverance, and to consider identity and cognitive engagement dependent on the educational context.
Background/Context: There is little question that education is changing, seemingly quickly and in some cases dramatically. The mechanisms through which individuals learn are shifting from paper-based ones to electronic media. Simultaneously, the nature of what individuals must learn is evolving, in good part due to an exponential accumulation of knowledge and of technology to access, share, and exploit that knowledge. Finally, how education is organized, offered, and administered is undergoing transformation, most apparentlybut not onlyin higher education. With potentially seismic changes in the mechanisms,
nature, and organization of education must also come changes in educational assessment.
here are three basic ways that I hear faculty talk about difficult dialogues—in-class dialogues that were planned ut did not go particularly well; in-class hot moments that were not anticipated and that the faculty member did not eel equipped to handle; and difficult dialogues that happen during office hours or outside of class.
n all three instances, faculty are challenged to use skills they may not have learned at any point in their disciplinary raining. That lack of skill can actually cause them great angst, and in the most extreme situations, cause them to avoid addressing important issues directly.
At a time of increasingly complex societal challenges and tight fiscal constraints, all participants agreed that social finance offers an opportunity for Canada to mobilize new sources of capital to generate positive social and financial returns. Despite recent advancements in the field of social finance, Canada remains in the early adoption stage and has yet to reach a stage of maturity. Participants agreed that transformational change takes time and commitment; as such, it should such change, reporting that there is increasingly more openness to innovation and more permission to think differently.
The increases in tuition and fee prices in 2015-16 were, like the increases in the two preceding years, relatively small by historical standards. However, the very low rate of general inflation makes this year’s increases in college prices larger in real terms than those of 2014-15 and 2013-14. Significantly, and perhaps counter to public impressions, price increases are not accelerating over time. However, the average published tuition and fee price of a full-time year at a public four-year institution is 40% higher, after adjusting for inflation, in 2015-16 than it was in 2005-06.The average published price is 29%
higher in the public two-year sector and 26% higher in the private nonprofit four-year sector than a decade ago.