Canadian higher education has in the past few years succumbed to a mood of despair and defensiveness. Until just a few years ago, it was characterized by a confident, forward-looking energy, secure in the notion that it was the preeminent engine of national development. Since then, we have seen our relative salaries decline; our plant, equipment, and libraries erode; our jobs threatened; and the value of our contribution to Canadian society severely questioned. A number of explanations could be given for this dramatic reversal of our fortunes, with emphasis ranging from demographics to poor public relations, from economic stagnation to short-sighted political manoeuvering. One popular explanation is that Canadian higher education is now (justly) paying off debts it incurred in a Faustian compact with homo economicus. We financed our tremendous growth of yesteryear, this explanation purports, on promises of contributing substantially (or worse, by ourselves, delivering) unprecedented economic growth and industrial expansion. Now that industrial expansion has come to a standstill (and even declined), the primary case for generous funding of higher education is at best called into question, and at worst severely undermined.
Work-integrated learning (WIL) has been identified as a key strategy for supporting Canada’s postsecondary education (PSE) system in responding to an increasingly dynamic, globalized, knowledge-based economy. Ontario in particular has been described as a “hot bed” of co-operative education (Ipsos Reid, 2010). However, while there is a common belief that WIL improves employment outcomes (see Gault, Redington & Schlager, 2000; Kramer & Usher, 2010), research on this topic has generally been specific to certain programs and types of WIL (Sattler, 2011).
More than half of the college students who visited their campus counseling centers during the 2015-16 academic year reported symptoms of anxiety, according to a survey by the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors.
This marks the seventh year in a row that anxiety has been the top complaint among students seeking mental health services. This year, 51 percent of students who visited a counseling center reported having anxiety, followed by depression (41 percent), relationship concerns (34 percent) and suicidal ideation (20.5 percent). Many students reported experiencing multiple conditions at once.
Colleges are feeling heat to prove that their students are learning. As a result, a growing number of colleges are
measuring intended “learning outcomes” as well as issuing grades. But fewer are using standardized tests than was the case a few years ago.
Those are findings of a new survey from the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). The liberal education organization received responses from chief academic officers at 325 of its member institutions, including community colleges and four-year institutions (public and private as well as a couple of for-profits).
What will it take for students to succeed beyond high school? How are schools preparing students for the reality of
college-level work?
One method that has gained popularity in the United States is allowing students to take college-level courses that apply toward their high school credits and can also be transferred to colleges, if they choose to pursue postsecondary education. This is known as a dual-credit program, and it is widely used and popular in the United States.
An Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU) Local 352 member speaks to a man crossing the union�s picket line at Fleming's Sutherland Campus during a faculty strike on Monday, October 16, 2017. Union members, including college professors, instructors, counsellors and librarians, hit the picket line Monday after negotiations between it and the College Employer Council fell flat. JESSICA NYZNIK/Peterborough Examiner/Postmedia Network
While the balancing power of collective bargaining is a positive force, Ontario's provincial government was right to order striking community college teachers back to work.
Harvard recently rescinded admission offers for some incoming freshmen who participated in a private Facebook group sharing offensive memes. The incident has sparked a lot of discussion: Was Harvard’s decision justified? What about the First Amendment? Do young people know the dangers of social media?
I’m a business school lecturer, career services counselor and former recruiter, and I’ve seen how social media becomes part of a person’s brand—a brand that can help you or hurt you.
College admissions staff, future employers and even potential dates are more and more likely to check your profile and make decisions or judgments about you.
Here’s what you should know so you don’t end up like those Harvard prospects.
Academic freedom is supposed to protect unpopular views. A case involving an Oberlin professor who claimed that
ISIS is really the CIA and Mossad asks whether that freedom extends to falsehoods.
With tuition prices continuing to climb and middle-class America’s earnings stagnant for more than a decade, colleges and universities continue to face pressure from government, governing boards, students and their families to provide proof of the value of a bachelor’s degree. Students historically have had little more to go on than anecdotal information when it came to the jobs and earnings they could expect upon graduation from a specific college or university.
When I recently returned to my department after a decade in administration, I looked forward to reconnecting with former olleagues, getting to know the grad students, going to lectures and colloquia, teaching undergrads, and yes, even serving on departmental committees. But when I moved into my faculty office and began my work schedule, I had only one question as I looked around my department: Where did everybody go?
If you walk into any dollar store in Canada you'll notice three things. First, things are cheap — not surprisingly, usually a dollar. Second, outside of food, nothing is made in North America. Third, they're often packed with customers.
The dollar store is a microcosm of what's wrong with our economy. In the closing days of the Cold War, the grinning avatars of hard conservatism — Reagan, Thatcher and Mulroney — helped to kick start a new global order that would supposedly bring prosperity to all by removing barriers to the free flow of investment capital and trade. Once the Berlin Wall fell, the last real barrier to a globalized world economy disappeared and it was full steam ahead.
Over two decades, governments and technology corporations followed suit by adding one brick after another to the ziggurat of the globalized economy: NAFTA (1988 and 1994), the invention of HTML and thus the Internet (1991), the Uruguay Round of GATT negotiations (1986-94), the WTO (1994), conservative Work Bank policies (from the 1990s on), the concentration of mass media in fewer and fewer hands, the Web 2.0 (2004 and on), deregulated financial markets under George W. Bush, smartphones (starting with Blackberries in 2003). The new order had its global markets, global communications network and a friendly banking system in place. This ziggurat is now more or less complete, with only a few outliers like North Korea beyond the pale.
This study contributes to the literature on the schooling of homeless and highly mobile students. Although previous work has detailed the demographics of home- lessness, the effects of homelessness on academic progress, and particular legal issues in homeless education, this research focused on how individual and institutional relationships influence homeless 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.
Major study of adaptive learning finds inconclusive results about its ability to improve outcomes and lower costs, but use at two-year colleges and in remedial courses shows potential.
As a minority group on university campuses, the unique needs of mature students can be easily
overlooked. It is important that the term “mature students” does not disguise the heterogeneity of this group: “…it
is erroneous to speak of ‘the adult learner’ as if there is a generic adult that can represent all adults.”1 However,
amongst this varied group of students, there are common concerns that they share. This policy sets out students’
priorities in increasing the visibility of mature students on campus as well as optimizing their educational
experience.
Mature students need more recognition of the different hurdles they face in achieving success. These can
include situational barriers like a lack of time, lack of money, health issues, or dependant care,2 as well as
attitudinal or dispositional barriers, including the fear of failure or alienation. Lastly, they also face systemic
barriers such as restrictive course offerings and availability of instructors or support services outside of regular
business hours.3
The purpose of this document is to provide a high-level introduction to economic impact analysis (EIA) in a postsecondary education (PSE) context, written for a non-subject-expert audience of postsecondary institution stakeholders. It is intended to serve as broad context for individuals in the postsecondary education community who may wish to measure the economic impacts of their institutions or understand the methods, findings and limitations in studies done elsewhere. The information contained herein is of a general nature and is not intended to be an exhaustive, detailed quantitative textbook in actually conducting such studies, nor is it intended to address the circumstances of any specific individual or entity.
A lot of Ontario teens are feeling anxious and depressed, and their numbers have grown. That’s the take-away from a large-scale study that’s been tracking students in the province for the last 20 years. One-third of the students in the survey were found to have moderate to severe symptoms of psychological distress – an alarming leap from two years earlier, when only one-quarter of students met the same threshold.
Now comes the hard part: figuring out why high schoolers are increasingly describing their lives as overwhelming, anxiety-inducing and stress-filled, and how to help them early because the higher up the grades you go, the worse the situation tends to get. Grade 12s, for instance, were four times more likely than Grade 7s to report high levels of stress, and more than twice as likely to rate their mental health as fair or poor. Older teens were significantly more likely to think about suicide. Yet they were no more likely than younger teens to seek help.
If we see a colleague with a fever, we say “go home and rest.” Why can’t we treat mental illness with the same understanding?
Today, I want to revisit the story David told in his last post. Someone he knew collapsed, became addicted to crystal meth and ended up homeless. We all wonder after such a story – could this have been prevented? Overall, it is difficult to provide a single answer and there is no one person to blame but I hope that after reading the list below, you will feel like you can help (even if it is only in a small way).
Nous cherchons à mesurer l’effi cience d’approches inductive ou déductive à court et à long terme sur l’apprentissage par des élèves de 1re secondaire de savoirs relatifs au complément du nom. Dans le cadre de cette expérimentation, les résultats montrent que l’approche déductive permet une appropriation signifi cativement plus grande, mais uniquement pour des aspects morphologiques. Par ailleurs, il semble que l’approche pédagogique ait moins d’incidence sur l’apprentissage que l’effet-enseignant, peu importe l’approche préconisée par l’enseignant. La discussion des résultats portera sur l’importance
de différentes variables de l’intervention éducative autre que l’approche pédagogique. Mots clés : approche déductive, approche inductive, approches pédagogiques, complément du nom, effet-enseignant, grammaire.
We attempt to measure the ef ficiency of inductive or deductive approaches to short and long-term learning of knowledge about the “complément du nom” by French as a fi rst language secondary 1 students. Our results show that, in the context of our experiment, the deductive approach allows greater appropriation of morphological aspects. Moreover, it seems that the
pedagogical approach has less impact on the learning than the teacher effect, regardless of the approach used. We will discuss our results in putting forward the importance of some conditions of the educative intervention. Keywords: complément du nom, deductive approach, grammar, inductive approach, pedagogical approaches, learning, teacher effect.
In Seven Essentials for Family-Professional Partnerships in Early Intervention, Bonnie Keilty explores the intricacy of the relationship-building process between early intervention (EI) professionals and the families they work with. EIs are called upon as a part of a team of specialists to work with families of young children with a range of medical and/or developmental concerns so as to foster progress toward developmental goals. Keilty positions family members as experts within this team, drawing on research from the family systems intervention approach that suggests families more fully engage in the goal-achievement process when collaborative relationships and participatory practices serve as the foundation of the family-professional partnership (FPP). Recognizing that the work of developing meaningful relationships between EIs and families is both essential and complex, this book looks at how to create and sustain relationships that enhance the FPP. In line with Auerbach’s (1995) suggestion that the movement towards familial partnerships that invoke an additive approach and that draw on families’ funds of
knowledge must be intentional, Keilty’s book provides a framework for EI practitioners to shift away from approaching families through a deficit lens and move towards relationships that resituate families as authentic partners in early interventions.