I remember the first time I tackled the controversial subject of students as customers. It was in an in-house newsletter, well before the advent of the Internet and e-mail. Even so, I had numerous phone calls, memos, encounters on campus, and discussions about it in every activity the teaching center sponsored for the next year. I hadn’t even taken a side; I had simply listed arguments for both sides. But, as far as the faculty were concerned then and pretty much since, there aren’t two sides. Students are not customers. Tuition dollars do not buy grades. Education does not come with a money-back guarantee. And students don’t get to choose what they learn—well, they do, but if they don’t choose to learn what we require, the consequences are costly.
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.
American colleges are educating more international students than ever before, according to a new report, “Open Doors Report on International Educational Exchange,” released by the Institute of of International Education. The widely anticipated report finds that nearly 1 million international students—many of them from countries such as China, India, Kuwait—were educated in the United States in the 2014-15 school year, up 10 percent from the previous year. These students typically arrive with the means to pay the full price tag for college.
While the 974,926 international students who studied in American colleges last school year accounted for only about 5 percent of the country’s entire higher-education population, their numbers are increasing rapidly with high concentrations in certain states, colleges, and majors. The significant increase in students from overseas highlights the need to understand more about their behavior, income, and impact on higher education—and how the country’s universities should capitalize on the trend without
compromising the education of in-state students and residents.
Independent college students, once considered “nontraditional,” now constitute the majority of students in the United States. As of 2012, just over half of all U.S. college students were independent (51 percent)—meaning they had at least one defining characteristic outlined in the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), including being at least 24 years old; married; a graduate or professional student; a veteran; an orphan, in foster care, or ward of the court; a member of the armed forces; an emancipated minor; someone who is homeless or at risk of becoming homeless; or having legal dependents other than a spouse (Federal Student Aid n.d.; IWPR 2016a).
As a new academic year approaches, universities across Canada are struggling to develop policies in response to the legalization of recreational cannabis. Many uncertainties remain, and while universities differ in how they plan to deal with cannabis on campus, they tend to agree on one thing: it’s complicated.
This paper presents preliminary findings from a pilot study whose purpose was to explore how we, a tenure-track faculty member and a doctoral student, understood and developed our teaching practice when engaged in a formal faculty–student relationship. Using a hybrid of collaborative inquiry and collaborative self-study—which included verbal and written dialogue, interrogation, as well as observation—we sought to understand how that formal faculty–student relationship promoted the development of strong teaching pedagogy. The motivation for this study was a commitment to fostering highquality teaching in undergraduate courses in our faculty of education. Driving this study was the research question: How are we investigating and improving upon our practices as teachers in post-secondary education?
THE MOST RECENT National Science Foundation (NSF) “Survey of Earned Doctorates” raises eyebrows, not because it paints a predictably bleak picture for the job prospects of humanities PhD students, but because people are surprised that prospects for engineering and science PhDs aren’t looking so good either.
I have written this Guidebook to assist users interested in creating a campus that will be more global in its mission, programs, and people. My approach is to focus on the views and contributions of the people who are engaged in higher education. Thus it has a “person” emphasis rather than a structural or policy point of view. I do this since I think that the goals, aspirations, and achievements of those working and studying on campus is the critical factor in creating a campus with a global perspective. (Campus is to be broadly defined to include both “in-place” multiple sites and virtual.)
n 2014, StudentsNS welcomed its first non-university member: the Student Association of the Nova Scotia Community College Kingstec Campus in Kentville. This report explores fees, funding and accountability structures at the College, as well as student financial assistance to college students. We seek to identify opportunities to improve or expand access, affordability, student voice and quality of education, with an emphasis on the first three values in particular. We find that the Nova Scotia Community College has prioritized access and affordability and delivered important outcomes, attracting more students from communities that are traditionally underrepresented in post-secondary education, and notably mature learners. The College also has relatively low cost programs because of their shorter length and lower fees. However, College students’ debt levels remain higher than the national average, are leading to elevated default rates and have been neglected by the Province as compared with university students’ debt. In terms of student voice and accountability, the College and the Province need to work harder to ensure transparency to the public and meaningful student participation in decision-making. We identify a number of modest policy changes that the College and the Province could pursue to address these challenges and help the College better serve Nova Scotians and deliver on its mandate.
TheEffective Classroom Interactions (ECI) online courses were designed to provide an engaging, effective and scalable approach to enhancing early childhood teachers’ use of classroom practices that impact children’s school readiness. The created courses included several versions aimed at testing whether or not certain design aspects could increase participation and subsequent learning outcomes. The purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which early childhood teachers accessed the courses and varied in their (a) participation in the core course content and (b) optional discussion board as a result of the course experience they were assigned to as well as individual characteristics that may be associated with participation. As might be expected, findings indicated that early childhood teachers accessed the course often on nights and weekends, even though participating centers allowed their teachers to do coursework during work time. In addition, participants reported high levels of satisfaction with their experience. Both persistence in the ECI courses and overall completion of activities were higher than those reported in other studies of online learning. The participation of early childhood educator teachers was consistently predicted by comfort with technology, credit or non-credit status and assignment to the group that included regular conferences with the instructor. These relationships, however, did not always occur in expected ways. Implications for exploring online learning as a feasible option for early childhood educators are discussed.
Hosting international students has long been admired as one of the hallmarks of internationalization. The two major formative strands of internationalization in Canadian universities are development cooperation and international students. With reduced public funding for higher education, institutions are aggressively recruiting international students to generate additional revenue. Canada is equally interested in offering incentives for international students to stay in the country as immigrants after completing their studies. In its 2011 budget, the Canadian federal government earmarked funding for an international
education strategy and, in 2010, funded Edu-Canada—the marketing unit within the Department of Education and Foreign Affairs (DFAIT)—to develop an official Canadian brand to boost educational marketing, IMAGINE: Education in/au Canada. This model emulates the Australian one, which rapidly capitalized on the recruitment of international students and became an
international success story. Given current Canadian higher education policy trends, this paper will address the cautionary lessons that can be drawn from the Australian case.
Discussed below are seven classroom strategies that are frequently encouraged by teacher trainers and/or administrators and are assumed to be useful. However, when examined more closely what one sees is that they are actually highly ineffective and tend to encourage negative effects on the classroom climate, students’ psychology and level of function and order in the class. We need to therefore stop suggesting teachers use them, and if they have been suggested to you, you might politely decline and instead consider implementing better alternative practices that will get you long-term positive results such as those described below.
It’s now simply a given among student affairs professionals that parents will be involved in their children’s lives at
university.
John Hannah notes, with a laugh, that his kids are “nauseatingly close to postsecondary age.” The father of two will soon watch as his teenagers begin the exciting but often bureaucratic and stressful journey of applying to university. Mr. Hannah must make a tough call: how much, exactly, should he hand-hold, guide and support them during this pivotal step towards adulthood?
As director of special projects in student affairs at Ryerson University, he’s more than equipped to lend a helping hand. Mr. Hannah has spent more than 15 years in higher education, primarily in student affairs roles, helping other people’s children weather the highs and lows sprung upon them during their first major foray outside the family nest. When it comes to university life, Mr. Hannah is an expert. He’s calmed the nerves of many a parent having a minor panic attack over sending their beloved babies off to university.
While an academic goes about her public online activities, someone calls her a stupid c*nt, tells her they hope she is raped and wishes her a gruesome death. Or maybe they just tell her she is dumb and should get back in the kitchen. Or that she should smile or exercise more. Perhaps they do this in response to an opinion she expressed, or a research paper she published, or perhaps it is simply because of her gender, race or sexuality.
In a previous article, I wrote about the challenges and rewards of chairing an academic department and offered my postchair analysis of my performance. In this essay, I talk about the skill set needed for drama-free delivery of your curriculum and reasonably happy colleagues.
We all know the saying “the devil is in the details.” It means that sometimes the success or failure of projects, careers, parties or performances hinges on some detail that was either poorly planned or neglected. Once I took an exam to be hired by a large corporation that used bubble sheets. I brought with me, as instructed, two pencils for the task. I carefully selected them, and they were freshly sharpened and gleaming. If only I had thought to check whether they were No. 2 pencils. The proctors for the exam, who were also human resources executives, gave me that tsk-tsk look as they handed me the stubby in-house pencils. Ultimately, the wrong leads dashed my dreams of carrying a platinum card by American Express and cruising in a European luxury automobile.
The Halton Catholic District School Board may be on the verge of deflating one of the biggest bubbles in Canadian public education. Later this month, the school board will consider ending its French immersion program.
Many middle-class parents will find this heretical, as they have flocked to the program in droves over the last decade. But just as the GTA’s frenzied housing market experienced a much-needed return to sanity, it is high time for our schools to be released from the spell of French immersion.
French immersion programs started in the 1970s as a nation building effort in what had then become an officially bilingual country. For years, it remained a small boutique program within most school boards. However, within the last decade, enrolments across the country have exploded.
It happens nearly every semester: I get a paper so bad I don't know how to grade it. I'm not talking about a late paper, or one that's been plagiarized, or is too short or off topic. No, I’m referring to a species of essay that checks all of the superficial boxes but is so poorly written, so shoddily done, that it seems to demand a special response.
It’s actually hard for students to get a bad grade on a piece of writing in my courses. I do in-class workshops on topic choice, thesis construction, rough drafts, and revision. Students have many opportunities to find out that their essay is on the wrong track, and fix the problem. It’s almost impossible for them to leave the writing to the last minute. But there's always one ...
The College Standards and Accreditation Council is presenting Ontario’s Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology with an important challenge. CAATs must comply with CSAC requirements, among which is an overall commitment to general education. CSAC has voiced the employers’ need for graduates who combine vocational skills with demonstrable communicative competence, social awareness, and critical thinking. It has recognized that vocational training alone cannot foster personal growth and enrichment.
Ontario is reviewing its university funding model, an enrolment-based formula through which the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities distributes a $3.5B annual provincial operating grant to the province’s 20 publicly assisted universities.
We examined the existing model in our June 2015 paper The Ontario University Funding Model in Context. We observed that the model is a relatively small (27 %) component of total university system revenues. We concluded that this small slice of funding must be managed in a focussed and strategic way if it is to be effective in shaping behaviour towards desired provincial objectives (HEQCO, 2015).
n November 2005, the province of Ontario and the federal government signed two historic agreements – the Canada-Ontario Labour Market Development Agreement and the Canada-Ontario Labour Market Partnership Agreement. One year later, on Nov. 24, 2006, key labour market stakeholders, including users, delivery agents and government came together to collectively take stock of progress and to explore how partners can help governments move forward with successfully implementing the agreements.