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
The United States is at a crossroads in its policies towards the family and gender equality. Currently America provides basic support for children, fathers, and mothers in the form of unpaid parental leave, child-related tax breaks, and limited public childcare. Alternatively, the United States’ OECD peers empower families through paid parental leave and comprehensive investments in infants and children.
One of the core principles of the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance (OUSA) is that all willing and qualified students should be able to attend post-secondary regardless of their ability to pay. However, students in Ontario face the
highest tuition fees in the country and the cost and perceived costs of post-secondary education are consistently identified as barriers to post-secondary education. These barriers are contributing factors to the persistently high attainment gaps for various vulnerable groups in pursuing an undergraduate degree.
The wave of upcoming retirements is a myth and PhD numbers have little to do with the academic job
market anyway.
In my last post I took a look at some of the history and context of Canadian universities’ hiring of contract faculty. While I was digging around for information, I couldn’t help noticing the relevance of some of the material to another ongoing debate in higher education: that of the “overproduction” of PhDs. Since “too many PhDs” is a recurring theme in media commentary about
graduate education (e.g. Nature, The Economist), I thought I’d explore the issue in more depth and connect it to some of the research I found. Are we really “producing” too many PhDs, and if so, is this a recent problem?
This week, we released a study examining the relationship between the supply of graduates from six regulated professions – medicine, law, teaching, architecture, engineering, nursing – and the labour demand for these graduates. The historical evidence provided in that analysis is clear – we never get it right! We either oversupply or undersupply.
THE question of educational priorities becomes increasingly important as contemporary culture becomes more complex and more tasks are thrust upon the school. The identification of priorities is difficult, however, and, in an age of ideological conflict, almost inevitably controversial. Decisions concerning priorities in the school program need to be based on the characteristics of contemporary culture, some conception of ideals and values, and the best available knowledge regarding the dual growth and development and the learning process.
How to resolve the top enrolment barriers that decrease student satisfaction and negatively impact enrolment efforts.
They’re called “Enrolment Barriers” for a good reason. If your institution isn’t doing all that it can to remove them, there’s a good chance your future students will enrol, uninhibited, at a PSE institution down the road, and your current student satisfaction will be underwhelming. Looking for common barriers? Poor relationships with transactionally focused front line staff, disingenuous interactions with parents, behind-the-times processes/communications and siloed operations are just a few to seek out.
Lori Ernsperger's Recognize, Respond, Report: Preventing and Addressing Bullying of Students with Special relevant. The book addresses research-based strategies for combating bullying as it applies to students with N deiesdasb iilsi ttiiems ewlyh oa nadre roaftthene ro dviesrtliollos ktehde ianv tahilea bwlied elirt erreasteuarrec hin oton ab uclolyhiensgi vaen dst rparteevgeyn tsihoanp.e Tdh bey a huethr oorw dno eexs pneorti epnucrep oarntd t oe xipnterrotdisuec aes n ae w30 s-tyreaatre gvieetse rbaunt of public schools and academia.
Lori Ernsperger's Recognize, Respond, Report: Preventing and Addressing Bullying of Students with Special relevant. The book addresses research-based strategies for combating bullying as it applies to students with N deiesdasb iilsi ttiiems ewlyh oa nadre roaftthene ro dviesrtliollos ktehde ianv tahilea bwlied elirt erreasteuarrec hin oton ab uclolyhiensgi vaen dst rparteevgeyn tsihoanp.e Tdh bey a huethr oorw dno eexs pneorti epnucrep oarntd t oe xipnterrotdisuec aes n ae w30 s-tyreaatre gvieetse rbaunt of public schools and academia.
This paper explores the concept of accountability as it relates to the University of British Columbia. It examines the discourse surround- ing social accountability laid out in the university’s Trek 2010 vision and then juxtaposes this with the private accountability to commercial and government interests as evidenced in other documents and recent university decisions. The paper, thus, concludes that both private and public attempts at accountability are present yet the call to account to a wider social public gets muffled by the vagueness of the goals and, in particular, the appeals to excellence.
There’s surprisingly little research on the effects of graduate student instruction on undergraduates and of teaching experience on graduate students’ eventual careers. But conventional wisdom suggests that seasoned faculty members make better undergraduate instructors and that graduate students benefit from more time spent on finishing their dissertations than on teaching. For those reasons and others, some institutions -- most recently Purdue University -- have taken steps toward increasing faculty-undergraduate interaction and limiting the use of graduate students as instructors.
Colleges can not only help students past their immediate crises, writes Joseph Holtgreive, but also encourage them to unlock capacity that they didn't know existed and ways of tapping into it.
Competition between providers in any market incentivises them to raise their game, offering consumers a greater
choice of more innovative and better quality products and services at lower cost. Higher education is no exception.
For the past 18 years, I have worked at the same university. I see some distinct advantages in that — most notably, that I haven’t had to look for another job in all that time. There is also something to be said for avoiding the pains of relocating. And staying put has allowed me to establish really rewarding ties with the surrounding community.
But there are also serious problems for any academic who pursues a faculty career in one place. As my Twitter friend John Warner recently noted, perhaps the most common way for professors to get a raise is to apply for a job elsewhere. Then, if you get a job offer, you take it to administrators at your current campus and try to get them to match the salary and benefits you would receive if you changed jobs.
This study provided a comprehensive examination of the full range of transformational, transactional, and laissez-faire leadership. Results (based on 626 correlations from 87 sources) revealed an overall validity of .44 for transformational leadership, and this validity generalized over longitudinal and multisource designs. Contingent reward (.39) and laissez-faire (-.37) leadership had the next highest overall relations; management by exception (active and passive) was inconsistently related to the criteria. Surprisingly, there were several criteria for which contingent reward leadership had stronger relations than did transformational leadership.
Furthermore, transformational leadership was strongly correlated with contingent reward (.80) and laissez-faire (-.65) leadership. Transformational and contingent reward leadership generally predicted criteria controlling for the other leadership dimensions, although trans-formational leadership failed to predict leader job performance.
This paper introduces two new concepts to the debate on job quality: the low-wage gap and low-wage intensity. These two measures provide information on the depth and severity of low wages. Using Labour Force Survey microdata, we discuss trends in these two measures, along with trends in the incidence of low wages over the 1997-2014 period. For example, in 2014, 27.6 per cent of all employees aged 20 to 64 years earned less than two-thirds of median hourly wages for full-time workers aged 20 to 64 years (or $16.01 per hour), our low-wage cutoff. In this same year, the low-wage gap was 21.0 per cent, which means that the average low-wage employee earned approximately 79.0 per cent of the low-wage cutoff (or $12.66 per hour). Consequently, low-wage intensity, defined as the product of the incidence and the gap (scaled by 100) was 5.8. This is down from an intensity of 6.3 in 1997, which was the result of a slightly higher incidence (27.9 per cent) and a higher gap (22.7 per cent). This paper also provides these results by gender, age, educational attainment, industry, occupation, employment status and province. These detailed results help identify which groups face the highest rates, greatest depths, and largest intensities of low-wage employment in Canada. Furthermore, this paper explores the implications of a $15 minimum wage on the low-wage gap in 2014. Finally, to provide a brief sensitivity analysis, we discuss (1) the results for low-wage employment in Canada using a different cutoff (two-thirds mean hourly wages for full-time employees aged 25 to 54 years) and (2) comparisons of our results to those of CIBC’s Employment Quality Index and the OECD’s low-pay data.
Educational Consulting Services (ECS) has supported every college in Ontario in the planning of their campuses and buildings. The focus of this work has been the reconciliation of the colleges’ education and training missions with their infrastructure. As campus and space planners, ECS has assisted in enhanced space management, transformation of facilities, and improved utilization.
This report is a compendium of observations and a high level commentary on the question of capital funding. It was prepared at the request of ACAATO and draws on ECS’s experience in Ontario and other jurisdictions. The report also draws on
information provided by college administrators for this study.
Background/Context: Increasingly, researchers and educators have argued that alternative conceptions of Whiteness and White racial identity are needed because current conceptions have undermined, rather than strengthened, our critical pedagogies with White people. Grounded in critical Whiteness studies, and drawing especially on the writings of Ralph Ellison and Leslie Fiedler on what it means to be a White American, this article describes and theorizes White racial identity in ways that avoid oversimplification, but that at the same time never lose sight of White privilege and a larger White supremacist context.
Focus of Study: The research focused on the social production of racial identity for four White men and explored how their racial identities were dependent on relations with real and imagined racial others.
The more than one million undergraduate students heading to Canadian universities this fall will benefit from innovative approaches to teaching and learning, including more opportunities for experiential learning. After graduation, they’ll enjoy
higher earnings and better employment outcomes than those without degrees.
Ontario's colleges of applied arts and technology (CAATs) were granted authority to offer bachelor degrees in 2000, and the first degree programs were offered in 2002. The rationale for granted colleges permission to offer degrees was threefold: first it was to meet the needs of a higher skilled workforce in a changing economic, social and political environment; second, it was to widen access to degrees for Ontarians overall, but particularly for students from disadvantaged backgrounds who are more likely to attend a college than a university; and third, it was anticipated that college degrees would be less expensive than university degrees for students and governments (Skolnik 2016b).