I have grown weary with all the calls for educational success to be defined by how much graduates make.
There are college rankings that claim to be about the value of degrees from various institutions. What this really means is that
it lists colleges by how much their graduates make on average. Now, I suppose some would expect me to like this measurement of colleges since my alma mater does quite well. But I am appalled at the equation of a good education and a high salary.
This measurement degrades students who choose careers that do not pay a lot — teachers, social workers, ministers, etc. But
clearly people who do some of the most important jobs in America are being left behind in an economy that is continuing down the road of greater economic inequality.
The debate over how universities and colleges should relate to one another has been lively in Ontario for at least two decades.
This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the commissioning of a province-wide review of the colleges’ mandate whose report recommended greater opportunities for advanced training – defined as “education that combines the strong applied focus of college career-oriented programs with a strong foundation of theory and analytical skills.” The report envisaged that some advanced training would be undertaken by colleges alone, and some would be offered jointly with universities and would lead to a university degree (Vision 2000 Steering Committee 1990, 16-17). A follow-up report in 1993 found that opportunities for advanced training remained “isolated and not part of an integrated and planned system of advanced training, with equitable
student access” (Task Force on Advanced Training 1993, 11-13).
Background: Much research has sought to investigate emotions and forms of emotion management among teachers worldwide, including the connection between educational change and teacher emotion; the association between the culture of teaching and teachers’ emotional experience within parentteacher interactions; the link between teacher emotion and teacher beliefs; and the
expressions and sources of a wide variety of emotions in teaching.
Have your students ever told you that your tests are too hard? Tricky? Unfair? Many of us have heard these or similar comments. The conundrum is that, in some circumstances, those students may be right.
Assessing student learning is a big responsibility. The reason we report scores and assign grades is to communicate information about the extent of student learning. We use these indicators to judge whether students are prepared for more difficult work or ready to matriculate into majors or sit for certification exams. Ideally, scores and grades reflect a student’s learning of a particular body of content, content we intended them to learn. Assessments (e.g., tests, quizzes, projects, and presentations) that are haphazardly constructed, even if unintentionally, can result in scores and grades that misrepresent the true extent of students’ knowledge and leave students confused about what they should have been learning. Fortunately, in three easy steps, test
blueprinting can better ensure that we are testing what we’re teaching.
I have a question about cover letters. In your blog posts and book, you stress the importance of putting research first in a cover letter for positions at research-oriented institutions, and teaching first for openings at teaching-oriented colleges. Sometimes, though, it’s hard to tell which camp an institution falls under. Any advice?
Indeed, in presenting yourself as a desirable job candidate for a particular institution, it is imperative that your application materials align you with the main focus — the main mission, if you will — of the place to which you are applying. The cover letter is the first indicator that you understand what will make you both effective and tenurable at a given institution, and search committees looking to fill a tenure-track position want to be sure they "spend" that tenure line on someone who will be successful.
If I were the czar of higher education that is not explicitly vocational, I would require every undergraduate to study philosophy. And if I were both czar and czarina, I would require all students to take two philosophy courses — one in their first year and another just before graduation.
At first blush, that requirement may seem bizarre, especially coming from me. I am a psychologist and, more broadly, a social scientist — not a philosopher or a humanist. Even more deplorably, I have never taken a philosophy course myself.
If you or someone you know is suffering from depression, it can be difficult to know where to turn. There are many excellent resources online that you can use to find out more about depression, including treatments, where to get help, and support for family and friends.
Below is a selection of some of the best websites, organizations and other helpful resources available to anyone who has been diagnosed with or suspects they are suffering from depression.
The past few years have ushered in more strident calls for accountability across institutions of higher learning. Various internal and external stakeholders are asking questions like "Are students learning what we want them to learn?" and "How do the students' scores from one institution compare to its peers?" As a result, more institutions are looking for new, more far-reaching ways to assess student learning and then use assessment findings to improve students' educational experiences.
OTTAWA — Federal officials, as part of the government’s latest efforts to crack down on bad debts, are trying to figure out why graduates from private career colleges are more likely to have problems repaying their student loans.
Roughly nine per cent of the almost half-million students who receive federal assistance each year through the Canada Student Loans program go to private schools, including career colleges
According to the Ministry Education-supported Student Transition Project, about 30,000 B.C. high school grads enrol in post-secondary institutions each year.
Of that number, 17 per cent eventually earn a bachelor’s degree and 21 per cent earn certificates or diplomas of one kind or another.
But post-secondary education, especially a university education, doesn’t come cheap and doesn’t always fulfil its promises.
University tuition and other costs, including books and living expenses, for a Canadian four-year university degree can average more than $60,000, according to BMO’s Wealth Institute report.
The purpose of this qualitative case study was to gain insights into how aca-demics understand undergraduate graduand attributes. The findings reveal some alignment in views about student attributes, including that they are engaged citizens, are self-directed, have imagination, are questioning, are flexible, display leadership, are problem solvers, and possess character. This consistency, however, does not include the spectrum of views on how these attributes are conceived and developed. The findings reveal a range of inter-pretations regarding the kinds and levels of understandings of how graduand student attributes are developed throughout an undergraduate program of study. The findings indicate that (i) a shared understanding does not exist on how academics construe student attributes, (ii) academics do not share com-mon meanings about the core achievements of a higher education, or how these are developed through students’ undergraduate programs, and (iii) stu-dent attributes tend not to be perceived as developing from the usual process of an undergraduate education.
KSU redefined the MOOC value proposition through collaboration of university leadership and faculty. The new proposition shifts measures of success beyond just course completion to include measures that benefit students, faculty, and the institution. Students benefitted through access to open educational resources, the acquisition of professional learning units at no cost, and the potential of college credit at a greatly reduced cost. Academic units benefited through a mechanism to attract students and future revenue while the university benefited through digital impressions, branding, institutionally leveraged scalable learning environments, streamlined credit evaluation processes and expanded digital education.
Students struggling with their gender identity or sexual orientation have the longest-term counselling treatment while in college, according to a new report by the Center for Collegiate Mental Health. Students considering self-harm or suicide also participate in more counselling sessions -- and the number of students who reported they purposefully injured themselves or attempted suicide continues to rise. But far from a crisis, this represents more students seeking treatment, experts say.
How many friends have you got, and how many people do you know? If you use social media such as Facebook and Twitter you can probably quantify these things quite readily, but the answers will be wildly inaccurate as we all routinely overestimate these things.
What is more, the answers will be irrelevant to your work as an academic. We are all quite naturally obsessed with what our friends and acquaintances think of us and we crave evidence of the esteem in which we are held.
Like most professors who teach composition, I require my students to write multiple drafts — three, in fact — of each essay. That’s not because three is a magic number. It’s just a number that fits well with the amount of time we have in the semester, and it reinforces the idea of working through multiple drafts. If there is a "secret" to good writing, I’m convinced, multiple drafts is it.
And, like most of my colleagues, I regularly have students work in "peer editing" or "workshopping" sessions where they read and offer comments on one another’s work.
None of this is groundbreaking pedagogy. In fact, it’s pretty standard fare for a college-level writing course.
So let’s start with the big picture. What is the purpose of schools in our society? Why do societies invest so many resources into educating their young? Yes, we teach so that students will learn, but to what end? What is the point? Of what benefit and to whom is a well-educated public? These kind questions have to do with the philosophy of education. (A philosophy is a set of principles based on one’s values and beliefs that are used to guide one's behavior.) These kinds of questions greatly affect how we educate students yet, they do not get asked nearly enough. Below is a list of possible reasons for educating young humans. You will most likely find that it is hard to select just one; instead, there seems to be a variety of reasons or purposes.
OCUFA has presented timely and thoughtful policy positions throughout its existence on a broad range of postsecondary and related issues. Of the issues gaining prominence with government and policymakers in the past decade, how Ontario's public postsecondary institutions relate, co-operate, and collaborate to present the best possible pathways for students to their desired postsecondary outcomes has become increasingly important.
As the cost of college has risen, so has the number of students who are struggling to meet their basic needs. In one
recent survey, more than one in five students said they had gone hungry in the past month. Close to one in 10 said
they had been homeless at some point in the past year.
Three rising juniors describe how they made it to college despite lacking steady housing, regular meals, and the
tools to complete their high-school assignments.
During the last third of the twentieth century, college sectors in many countries took on the role of expanding opportunities for baccalaureate degree attainment in applied fields of study. In many European countries, colleges came to constitute a parallel higher education sector that offered degree programs of an applied nature in contrast to the more academically oriented programs of the traditional university sector. Other jurisdictions, including some Canadian ones, followed the American approach, in which colleges facilitate degree attainment for students in occupational programs through transfer
arrangements with universities. This article offers some possible reasons why the Ontario Government has chosen not to fully embrace the European model, even though the original vision for Ontario’s colleges was closer to that model to than to the American one.
I’ve been receiving an unprecedented number of calls from presidents across the country asking me to “talk [them] off the ledge.” Most of those conversations have been with presidents whom I judge to be effective and emotionally grounded. Yet each person has been distressed in ways that I didn’t find common during my earlier years in higher education.