61% of parents have more than one type of debt, with a mean number of debt types at 2.25
▪ 28% of parents have either type of student loan debt (for parents’ or kids’ education), and 5%
have student loan debt for both parents’ and kids’ education
▪ Parents with student loan debt (from parents’ education) are significantly more likely to have
credit card debt (67% vs. 54%) and payday loan debt (19% vs. 7%)
▪ Parents with student loan debt (from kid’s education) are significantly more likely to have
credit card debt (75% vs. 54%) and payday loan debt (38% vs. 5%)
▪ Parents with student loan debt (from parents’ education) are significantly more likely to say
they lose sleep worrying about college costs for their kids (49% vs. 40%)
Check the backpack of any higher education student and you’re likely to find a smartphone. The handy handheld tool has long been a favorite of on-the-go college kids to remain on task through the use of calendaring; up-to-date with e-mail and Internet access; and ‘in the know’ by way of social media, IM and text messaging.
Mobile computing is mainstream. But despite its ubiquity in the personal lives of students — and the efficiencies it brings — mobile computing has not been utilized by the higher education community to enhance student learning and deliver content and resources with greater efficiency. Until now.
Identified as the No. 1 technology to watch for out of more than 110 technologies considered, the Horizon Report predicts that mobile computing will enter mainstream use for teaching and learning within the next 12 months. The set of teaching and learning activities that are well-suited to mobile devices continues to evolve rapidly as mobile devices and networks improve, educators and instructional designers develop innovative uses for those devices and networks as applied to education, and courses and curriculum are redesigned to take advantage of mobile computing as a delivery medium for blended and online programs.
Business programs in particular are poised to take advantage of the benefits mobile computing has to offer, with the following uses becoming commonplace in undergraduate business concentrations and MBA programs:
• Course registration and scheduling
Students can register for courses via mobile devices and view class schedules and calendars once enrolled. In addition, mobile devices provide the perfect platform for communicating last-minute changes to meeting times or places, as well as accessing other timely alerts.
• Access to assignments and course materials Students can access course content via learning management
systems, cloud computing solutions and shared portals.
Information and data can be uploaded, downloaded and revised.
• Collaboration on group projects
Group work is a substantial and critical component of business
school curriculum, and mobile computing enables teams of students to communicate and collaborate on projects across space and time.
• In-class polling
Some mobile device platforms are capable of running applications to support in-class polling, effectively eliminating the
need for standalone clicker systems in lecture halls.
The issue of the “boy gap” or “boy crisis” in education has been the subject ofincreasing attention across a number of OECD countries. The issue has also captured the attention of the Canadian media. As the Globe and Mail recently emphasized in their six-part series on ‘failing boys’:
“data suggests that boys, as a group, rank behind girls by nearly every measure of scholastic achievement. They earn lower grades overall in elementary school and high school. They trail in reading and writing, and 30 per cent of them land in the bottom quarter of standardized tests, compared with 19 per cent of girls. Boys are also more likely to be picked out for behavioural problems, more likely to repeat a grade and to drop out of school altogether”. (Globe and Mail, October 15, 2010)
Given the importance of this issue and the need to better understand the situation in boys' education, this report draws on material and data from a review of websites, research reports and relevant data sources, as well as informal consultations with some official and expert sources, to scope out four main questions:
1. What is the situation regarding education and training participation and
results for boys and men throughout the OECD, including post-secondary
education and trades?
2. Are there policies and practices in place to attenuate unfavourable trends?
3. What are Canadian jurisdictions doing?
4. What do we know about the success and failure of various models OECDwide
with a focus on Germany, the United States, Australia and the United
Kingdom?
It should be noted that there is a substantial disconnect between public policy commentary on issues in the “developed” and “non-developed” worlds. In the latter, priority attention continues to be centred on the barriers and obstacles faced by females in education and the labour market. Access to education in all its forms is still significantly more available to males in such countries. The UN Girls’ Education Initiative (UNGEI) is focused on ensuring that a gender equity
and equality perspective is brought to bear within the broad context of the UN’s Education for All (EFA) initiative, and is reflected in the Global Monitoring Reports issued by the EFA.
In is also the case that attention within OECD countries continues to be paid to the traditional barriers faced by women in many areas of education and
employment. A “question scan” done by CCL for the British Columbia Ministry of
Advanced Education only a few years ago identified a number of studies and
reports on the issue of gender in PSE access; all of them focused on the
question of female participation and access, none on the “boy crisis”.
It is also the case that attention in several OECD jurisdictions has shifted in some circles in the past number of years to the phenomenon of a substantial shortfall of the percentage of males, compared to females, who complete secondary schooling, and who are enrolled in and graduate from PSE. The implications of this “boy gap” are increasingly being pondered in such countries as Canada, the U.S., the U.K. and Australia. The statistical picture in terms of this gender gap, as
shown in literacy rates, school achievement in literacy, and participation and success in university studies, has been quite clear in such jurisdictions for two decades and more; the implications of this gap, however, are not at all a matter of consensus. Nor are the public policy and program responses either clear or consistent.
Question 1: What is the situation for boys and men throughout the OECD,
including PSE and the trades?
The purpose of this section is to present general statistics on performance and participation in education and training for both boys/young men and girls/young women across OECD countries. The data have been selected to provide a preliminary overview that can be used to direct further research and analysis.
Given the parameters of this project, it is not possible to complete a comprehensive survey of data. For the purposes of this paper, the focus is on Australia, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States, using a limited number of variables.
This first section focuses entirely on statistics and trends. It becomes obvious early in any consideration of this issue that its complexity and multifaceted nature present challenges. For clarity, the findings below are presented by educational sector.
1. Overview—general trends over time The relationship between education and skill development has been a well explored topic over the last decade, with many countries concluding that highly skilled and educated citizens are essential to meet the challenges of globalization and the knowledge economy. In an effort to help understand the complex network and inter-relationship of factors that influence individuals to participate and succeed in education and training, researchers have undertaken detailed research on educational outcomes and the influences on motivation, participation and completion of education.
Over the last couple of decades there has been increasing emphasis on maximizing the participation of under-represented groups such as immigrants, women and other minorities in education. Along the way, an interesting trend has emerged that is now clearly illustrated by the statistics—the statistics indicate that, overall, girls and women tend to do better in school environments, outperforming males. This is evident in both the secondary- and higher-education sectors. Research shows that girls/young women and boys/young men have distinctly different experiences in the various educational sectors.
2. K–12
For many years, gender-related research in the K–12 sector was focused on dropout rates in secondary schools. These rates were usually significantly higher for boys than girls, a trend which held across OECD countries.
PISA
The OECD PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), designed to explore “the educational performance and attitudes of adolescent males and females”, provides data to answer questions related to why female and male students perform differently. Ironically, one of the main rationales for PISA was to determine why females appeared disinterested in, and tended to be less successful in, mathematics and the physical sciences. However, PISA findings that demonstrated that boys had difficulty in the area of reading spurred further research into literacy among boys and, eventually, the design of specific
interventions to address related issues.
Statistical evidence about gender differences among young boys and girls is quite detailed. The OECD report, “Equally Prepared for Life?”, provides a summary of gender issues from early childhood based on results from PISA,
PIRLS (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study), TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) and other statistics that are gathered regularly.
Some of the main findings across OECD countries include1:
• Gender differences appear at early stages of education but they are small.
Females show better performance in reading in primary schools.
• Females showed significantly higher reading achievement than males in all (except two) countries by Grade 4. (2004 data)
• At Grade 4, the results for mathematics and science were mixed. Males had significantly higher scores for math in 12 countries while females had significantly higher scores in eight countries. In science, the scores for males and females were somewhat similar in more than half the countries
(2007).
• By Grade 8, on average, females had higher achievement than males in mathematics, although there were country variations. (2007) The same was true for science.
• Although PISA 2006 showed no significant differences between males and females in the overall performance in science, females were better identifying scientific issues while males were better at explaining phenomena scientifically.
- In the PISA 2009 reading assessment, girls outperform boys in every participating country by an average, among OECD countries, of 39 PISA score points—equivalent to more than half a proficiency level or one year
of schooling.
- On average across OECD countries, boys outperform girls in mathematics by 12 score points while gender differences in science performance tend to be small, both in absolute terms and when compared with the large 1 OECD, “Equally Prepared for Life?” 2009, pp. 3; 10–12;16–19; 2–24 and 27.
Immigrant families come to Canada with high education levels, with the Greater Toronto Area a primary destination. Despite high education levels, their economic and social integration into Canada is often difficult, due in part to lack of recognition of foreign credentials and work experience, weak official-language skills, and insufficient cultural competencies. For the children in these families, the young immigrants, successful education outcomes set the stage for success in adulthood, both in the workplace and in further education, enabling them to better integrate into Canadian society and contribute to the Canadian economy. This study examined the pathways of immigrant youth, and the role of English-language proficiency and region of origin in these pathways, using a recently created database containing a number of linked data sources from Seneca College, a large multicultural college in Toronto. This longitudinal dataset enables us to track individual students from the beginning of high school through to graduation from college, and their eventual transition into the labour market or to further education.
This report reflects the enthusiasm and commitment of students, staff and faculty in realizing the vision of environmental sustainability on Ontario’s university campuses.
The report is based on an annual survey of 20 Ontario universities conducted by the Council
of Ontario Universities (COU).
An Act respecting the establishment and governance of colleges of applied arts and technology
EXPLANATORY NOTE
NOTE EXPLICATIVE
The purpose of the Bill is to continue the power formerly con-tained in section 5 of the Ministry of Training, Colleges andUniversities Act to allow the establishment and governance ofcolleges of applied arts and technology. The colleges and theboard of governors for each college are established by regula-tion. Each board is a Crown agent.
Le projet de loi a pour objet de proroger le pouvoir auparavant prévu par l’article 5 de la Loi sur le ministère de la Formation et des Collèges et Universités afin de permettre l’ouverture et la régie des collèges d’arts appliqués et de technologie. Les col-lèges et le conseil d’administration de chacun d’eux sont mis en place par règlement. Chaque conseil est un mandataire de la Couronne.
There are many Indigenous perspectives in Canada and a diverse Indigenous student body, enrolled every year in a range of post-secondary programs. Indspire asked a sample of recent recipients of its Building Brighter Futuresi financial awards what led to their educational choices. What resulted was a better understanding of trends and lessons Indigenous learners can teach policy makers and program service delivery agents about what is important to them.
Understanding the motivations and decisions that successful First Nation, Inuit, and Métis students make, contributes to building and supporting Indigenous student success. Do Indigenous students make the same choices about attending post-secondary institutions as other cohorts of students? What drives the choices Indigenous students make, what brought them to their college or university of choice, what keeps them there, and what is contributing to their graduation? Are there things that can be done differently to improve the recruitment, retention, and graduation rate of Indigenous learners?
What is the evolutionary process of leadership theories?
Background: Suicide is the second leading cause of death for young Canadians (10–19 years of age) — a disturbing trend that has shown little improvement in recent years. Our objective was to examine suicide trends among Canadian children and adolescents.
Methods: We conducted a retrospective analysis of standardized suicide rates using Statistics Canada mortality data for the period spanning from 1980 to 2008. We analyzed the data by sex and by suicide method over time for two age groups: 10–14 year olds (children) and 15–19 year olds (adolescents). We quantified annual trends by calculating the average annual percent change (AAPC).
Results: We found an average annual decrease of 1.0% (95% confidence interval [CI] –1.5 to –0.4) in the suicide rate for children and adolescents, but stratification by age and sex showed significant variation. We saw an increase in suicide by suffocation among female children (AAPC = 8.1%, 95% CI 6.0 to 10.4) and adolescents (AAPC = 8.0%, 95% CI 6.2 to 9.8). In addition, we noted a decrease in suicides involving poisoning and firearms during the study period.
Interpretation: Our results show that suicide rates in Canada are increasing among female children and adolescents and decreasing among male children and adolescents. Limiting access to lethal means has some potential to mitigate risk. However, suffocation, which has become the predominant method for committing suicide for these age groups, is not amenable to this type of primary prevention.
In 2008, the OECD launched the AHELO feasibility study, an initiative with the objective to assess whether it is possible to develop international measures of learning outcomes in higher education.
Learning outcomes are indeed key to a meaningful education, and focusing on learning outcomes is essential to inform diagnosis and improve teaching processes and student learning. While there is a long tradition of learning outcomes’ assessment within institutions’ courses and programmes, emphasis on learning outcomes has become more important in
recent years. Interest in developing comparative measures of learning outcomes has increased in response to a range of higher education trends, challenges and paradigm shifts.
AHELO aims to complement institution-based assessments by providing a direct evaluation of student learning outcomes at the global level and to enable institutions to benchmark the performance of their students against their peers as part of their improvement efforts. Given AHELO’s global scope, it is essential that measures of learning outcomes are valid across
diverse cultures and languages as well as different types of higher education institutions (HEIs).
The field of student attrition has grown tremen dously over the past two decades. The demographic characteristics of the population have induced us to consider how our institutions can more effectively serve their students and hopefully retain more of them until degree completion. As a result, studies of dropout and policy-oriented workshops concerned with prevention of attrition have become commonplace.
On a typical day in 2014, more than 22 million cyberattacks threatened to infiltrate Penn State. Two
attacks targeting the university’s College of Engineering managed to slip past security systems. Thanks to an alert from the FBI, the university investigated the attacks and disconnected the college’s computer network from the Internet for three days while it beefed up security.
In K-12, school districts are constantly launching digital learning initiatives that require large amounts of bandwidth and mobile devices. But many of them don’t address the IT infrastructure beforehand. And that leads to horror stories of the network
slowing to a crawl with students and teachers unable to connect their devices to the Internet due to lack of wireless coverage.
“Infrastructure is one of those things that is not sexy and is not glamorous,” says Susan M. Bearden, director of information technology at Holy Trinity Episcopal Academy in Melbourne, Fla. “I mean, who really wants to hear about switches or bandwidth or choke points in a network? But if you don’t have that infrastructure in place, then you are setting yourself up for failure.”
Unfortunately, education institutions don’t always recognize the tenuous situation they’re in until they fall prey to successful cyberattacks and show-stopping network failures. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
This Center for Digital Education (CDE) Special Report guides education IT leaders through the trends, technologies and tips that will help them build a future-ready infrastructure to carry their institutions through the challenges of life
in the digital age.
The choice of whether and where to attend college is among the most important investment decisions individuals and families make, yet people know little about how institutions of higher learning compare along important dimensions of quality. This is especially true for the nearly 5,000 colleges granting credentials of two years or fewer, which together graduate nearly 2 million students annually, or about 39 percent of all postsecondary graduates. Moreover, popular rankings of college quality, such as those produced by U.S. News, Forbes, and Money, focus only on a small fraction of the nation’s four-year colleges and tend to reward highly selective institutions over those that contribute the most to student success.
Drawing on a variety of government and private data sources, this report presents a provisional analysis of college value-added with respect to the economic success of the college’s graduates, measured by the incomes graduates earn, the occupations in which they work, and their loan repayment rates. This is not an attempt to measure how much alumni earnings increase compared to forgoing a postsecondary education. Rather, as defined here, a college’s value-added measures the difference
between actual alumni outcomes (like salaries) and predicted outcomes for institutions with similar characteristics and students. Value-added, in this sense, captures the benefits that accrue from both measurable aspects of college quality, such as graduation rates and the market value of the skills a college teaches, as well as unmeasurable “x factors,” like exceptional leadership or teaching, that contribute to student success.
In the traditional college classroom today, faculty and students arrive with a certain set of expectations, shaped largely by past experiences. And although students may need the occa-sional (or perhaps frequent) reminder of what’s required of them, there’s usually something very familiar about the experience for both faculty and students alike.
In the online classroom, an entirely new set of variables enters the equation. It’s a little like trying to drive in a foreign country. You know how to drive, just like you know how to teach, but it sure is hard to get the hang of driving on the left side of the road, you’re not quite sure how far a kilometer is, and darn it if those road signs aren’t all in Japanese.
Residential schooling in Canada’s North deserves its own consideration for a number of reasons.
First, its history is more recent than that of residential schooling in the rest of the country. As late as 1900 there were only two residential schools north of the sixtieth parallel. By 1950 there were only six residential schools and one hostel in the North. This slow growth reflects the fact that while the overall goals of the Canadian govern-ment’s Aboriginal policy were to assimilate, civilize, and Christianize, this policy was not applied in a uniform manner. Where there was no pressing demand for Aboriginal lands, the federal government delayed taking on the obligations that Treaties created. This was particularly true in the North. As long as there was no prospect of economic development or of the arrival of large numbers of non-Aboriginal settlers, the federal government was not prepared to negotiate with northern Aboriginal peoples. Nor was it interested in establishing reserves or residential schools—or any sort of school, for that matter. Were it not for the work of Roman Catholic and Anglican missionaries, residential schooling would have no history north of the sixtieth parallel before 1950.
A second distinct feature of the situation in the North was the fact that, in the years after 1950, the Canadian government did not simply extend the existing southern res-idential school system into northern Canada. Instead the federal government created a system of day schools and hostels under the direction of Northern Affairs rather than Indian Affairs. This system was intended from the start to be integrated into, not separate from, the public school system of the day. Unlike the southern schools, the northern schools made no attempt to restrict admission to First Nations students, so Métis and Inuit, along with a number of non-Aboriginal students, also attended them. At the end of the 1960s, these schools were transferred from the federal government to the governments of the Northwest Territories and the Yukon.
What is a typical budget and staff size for admissions and recruitment for private vs. public and small vs. large institutions? To answer this question and provide up-to-date benchmarks, Noel-Levitz conducted a brief, web-based poll of enrollment and admissions officers across the United States in the fall of 2013. The poll was part of the firm’s ongoing series of benchmark polls for higher education.
Stratosphere:
Integrating Technoloyg, Pedagogy and Change Knowledge
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Many recent immigrant adult students (RIAS) are highly trained in their source countries and anticipate finding suitable employment upon arriving in Canada. (In this study, RIAS are defined as individuals over 24 years of age who have been living in Canada as permanent residents or citizens for less than 10 years.) There is mounting evidence, however, that in recent years the process of obtaining meaningful employment has become significantly more difficult for RIAS in particular. As a consequence, increasing numbers are turning to the Canadian postsecondary education (PSE) system to obtain more credentials and work experience as a means of gaining better access to employment. However, current research suggests that after entering universities and colleges, newcomers such as recent immigrants face a number of unexpected barriers to educational success, including lack of proficiency in either of Canada’s official languages; non-recognition of foreign transcripts and prior work experience; financial constraints; and insufficient knowledge concerning how the Canadian PSE system operates.
With increasing numbers of RIAS attending Ontario PSE institutions, there is growing concern that their learning needs may not be met, leading to decreased academic and employment success. Unfortunately, it appears that most PSE institutions have not identified RIAS as a group with unique learning needs. Academic success in PSE requires that students be fully
engaged and that they have access to resources that enhance engagement. There is a paucity of research concerning the degree to which RIAS are engaged in both academic and nonacademic components of Canadian PSE. Although all PSE institutions provide a variety of student services, there is no evidence that RIAS utilize them or that any particular benefits accrue in terms of promoting academic and social integration to even those RIAS who do use student services. This multi-institutional research study was conducted with the financial support of the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO). The study objectives included the following:
• developing a preliminary scale to measure RIAS engagement, consisting of academic and non-academic involvement in PSE,
• describing the demographic and institutional factors that influence RIAS engagement within their academic environment,
• identifying the unique immigration challenges of RIAS in PSE programs,
• identifying service needs and utilization patterns of RIAS, and
• developing recommendations for educational policy and service delivery changes within the Ontario PSE system.
The study also included exploration of the following research questions:
1. To what extent do RIAS become engaged with the academic community at the PSE institutions that they choose to attend?
2. What demographic and institutional factors influence their degree of academic engagement of RIAS?
The Canadian labour market suffered a severe blow during the last recession, with more than 430,000 persons losing their jobs and the unemployment rate reaching levels unseen since the latter half of the 1990s.
Subsequently, the labour market has shown great resilience, and there are now 900,000 more Canadians employed since the beginning of the recovery. Important weaknesses remain, however: long-term and youth unemploymentstill stand at obstinately high levels – despite a recent growth in job vacancies.
This E-Brief argues the best way to further support the Canadian labour market would be through policies that enhance labour mobility and emphasize skills training to help ensure unemployed Canadians have the right skill sets to
integrate into the workforce.
Abstract
Purpose – This paper aims to offer junior scholars a front-to-back guide to writing an academic, theoretically positioned, qualitative research article in the social sciences.
Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws on formal (published) advice from books and articles as well as informal (word-of-mouth) advice from senior scholars.
Findings – Most qualitative research articles can be divided into four major parts: the frontend,
the methods, the findings, and the backend. This paper offers step-by-step instructions for writing each of these four parts.
Originality/value – Much of the advice in this paper is taken-for-granted wisdom among senior scholars. This paper makes such wisdom available to junior scholars in a concise guide.
Keywords Qualitative research, Theoretical contribution, Writing an article
Paper type Technical paper