I spend most of my days in meetings with graduate students and postdocs, talking about where their careers might go. I jokingly say, “Nobody leaves my office without a networking tutorial.” And it’s true: for Ph.D.s engaged in a nonacademic job search, the concept of networking is omnipresent and unavoidable. Countless resources and articles are available to help novice networkers learn the basics of networking, and everyone knows the best way to become a better networker is to just get out there and network.
Ontario is working with college students, faculty, support staff, administrators and other experts to develop a forward-looking plan for Ontario's publicly assisted college system.
The province has appointed Sue Herbert to chair the College Task Force, which includes faculty, college representatives and students, along with industry and postsecondary education experts. It will make recommendations to support the delivery of high-quality, career-oriented postsecondary education and training that is accessible to students and responsive to changing labour market needs.
The College Task Force will explore a range of topics, including:
Student success and labour market readiness
Program pathways and support for students, including student mental health
Staffing models that would enhance program quality and improve student experience
Academic governance structures and intellectual property policies in the college system.
Perhaps the most powerful meme in all of higher ed is the one about staff bloat.
The growth of non-faculty postsecondary staff is blamed for everything from rising higher education costs, increased student debt, and the loss of faculty autonomy.
Admittedly, my interest in this story is self-interest. As a non-faculty postsecondary professional, it appears that I’m part of the problem. Leaving aside my own dog in this fight (if that is possible), I have to wonder about this overall narrative.
If staff are so bloated, why is it that every part of higher education that I observe seems to be so understaffed?
data. Germany recorded close to a 7 percent increase in international students coming to the country. This follows a jump of nearly 8 percent the previous year. Numbers have risen about 30 percent since 2012.
In most English-speaking countries, this kind of news would have university finance chiefs grinning from ear to ear: more international students means lots of extra cash from hefty tuition fees.
But in Germany, students -- on the whole -- famously pay no tuition fees, regardless of where they come from. Seen from the U.S. or Britain, this policy may appear either supremely principled or incredibly naïve. With international students making up nearly one in 10 students (and even more if you count noncitizens who attended German schools), why does the country
choose to pass up tuition-fee income and educate other countries’ young people for free?
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.
I joined the University of Virginia in 1982 as an assistant professor of business and reveled in the thrill of teaching and writing. As I advanced up the tenure-promotion ladder, I assumed various responsibilities to strengthen the institution: chair of this program and that committee and executive director of an institute.
In 2005, the president of my university called to ask if I would serve as the dean of the business school for a year. He’d been conducting a search and hadn’t been able to fill the slot in time for the start of the next academic year. He just needed a placeholder for a short while until he could close the sale with one of a number of candidates.
A report published last year in the Journal of Applied Psychology confirms what many might say is obvious: "Incivility, … defined as insensitive behavior that displays a lack of regard for others, is rampant and on the rise." This will not be news for academics. Consider the regular calls for an end to faculty incivility — the rudeness, abusive language, bullying, and general meanness that seem to characterize many of our interactions.
We aren’t the only profession with jerks, certainly. But the academy does seem to offer a refuge for the obnoxious. Tenure, seniority, academic freedom, and a penchant for large, unruly meetings and lengthy online arguments provide fertile ground for those who blow the hardest.
Many colleges and universities want to attract a more diverse work force and foster greater inclusivity in their faculty and administrative ranks, but don't know how. The Chronicle wants to help, so we've recast the weekly On Hiring newsletter and we're sharing stories, news, and data from around the web aimed at helping hiring managers and recruiters make better, more informed decisions about diversity hiring at their institutions and across higher education generally. Here are some highlights from the weekly newsletter. If you'd like to receive the new and improved On Hiring and Diversity newsletter, sign up here.
StudentsNS prioritizes the accessibility of post-secondary education (PSE) as one of its four foundational values because we believe that education is critical to the growth and development of individual Nova Scotians, their families, their communities, and the Province as a whole. This position paper will identify and describe the major barriers that exist in Nova Scotia and attempt to understand their impact on the post-secondary participation of historically marginalized populations. Existing public policy and programs aimed at preparing Nova Scotians for post-secondary education (primarily the K-12 public school system) are critically examined as well as other policies, programs, and community initiatives that make up Nova Scotia’s system of economic and social supports. Unfortunately, many Nova Scotians face significant economic, social, or other personal barriers in the pursuit of PSE and the many benefits that flow from it. Depending on individual circumstances, facing just one of these barriers could be enough to make PSE an unattainable goal. The sad reality is that many Nova Scotians face multiple barriers at the same time, which perpetuates cycles of multi-generational disadvantage. Based on our analysis, we make a total of 17 recommendations that would allow us to better understand the social barriers to post-secondary access, prepare adolescents for success at the post-secondary level, and make post-secondary institutions more welcoming, inclusive environments for students from historically underrepresented communities.
In the past fifteen years, there has been a shift in the way researchers have conceptualized identity, moving from the “identity-as-thing” to an under-standing of “identity-in-practice” (Leander, 2002, 198–199). This is not necessarily a new concept, as earlier researchers recognized sociocultural influences on perception (Bartlett, 1932/1995; Vygotsky, 1978) and on the performative nature of identity (Butler, 1990; Goffman, 1959). New Literacy Studies theorists (Barton, 1994, 2001; Gee, 1996, 2000; Street 1995, 1999) began to examine identity-in-practice in relation to literacy. In addition, ethnographic accounts (Heath, 1983; Purcell-Gates, 1997; Taylor, 1983; Taylor & Dorsey-Gaines, 1988) began to document ways that literacies and identities were interconnected. There was an epistemolog-ical shift, underscoring the individual and community practices that help to shape one’s identity. Literacies included all activities inside and out-side school, highlighting the relationship between people’s literacy prac-tices and their situated actions, behaviors, beliefs, and values, or their Discourses (Gee, 1999, 2008, 2011).
“Parents felt very isolated. They didn’t fit in with the other students or feel welcomed.”
Five years ago, Kayla Madder unexpectedly became pregnant while finishing up a second undergraduate degree at the University of Saskatchewan. After taking eight months off following the birth of her son Amari, she started a master’s degree in animal and poultry science. Still nursing, she and another graduate student friend, also a parent, asked around campus for suggestions on where to breastfeed. “We called around to all of the places that we thought might be able to help us with finding a space and no one really knew. Some suggested using a bathroom, which isn’t safe to breastfeed in, and some suggested using our cars,” she says.
This summer’s college president departure season is off to a swift start that has largely been marked by little
forewarning from colleges before exits are announced.
Many boards of trustees would consider it best practice to have a quick parting of ways with little surrounding
drama. But it doesn’t always go so smoothly in higher education -- it didn’t last summer -- making the pace and tone
of presidential partings so far this year stand out. Also noteworthy is that many recently announced transitions have
involved leaders who are relatively young or who are early in their tenures.
The president of Washington College on Maryland’s Eastern Shore resigned just a week after word leaked that all
was not well between her and the institution’s board. That president, former Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation
chair Sheila Bair, was two years into a five-year contract. She cited her family when she departed, but the college
did not go into depth on reasons for her resignation.
I recently overheard a faculty member talking about students, and it wasn’t good. She sounded very much like a conference presenter whom Melanie Cooper describes in a Journal of Chemical Education editorial. The presenter’s talk had a strong “students these days” undercurrent.
Sometimes we do need to vent. It isn’t easy teaching students who don’t come to class prepared, seem to always want the easiest way, are prepared to cheat if necessary, don’t have good study skills, and aren’t interested in learning what we love to teach. Venting, especially to a trusted colleague, helps us put things in perspective. At some point, though, venting morphs into
complaining, and what we say about students becomes what we think about them. And that's when it starts getting dangerous, because it affects how we teach.
Danny Leznoff was the first male in Simon Fraser University’s chemistry department to take parental leave after the birth of his child, something he has done twice. Early in the new millennium, Dr. Leznoff says his experience at SFU was at “the pointy edge of the wedge university-wide.” His first daughter, Sayako, was born in July 2004. Having recently received tenure, the associate professor took paternity leave for four months – one term – that September. But he wasn’t originally planning to take time off at all.
If there’s a perfect grading system, it has yet to be discovered. This post is about point systems—not because they’re the best or the worst but because they’re widely used. It is precisely because they are so prevalent that we need to think about how they affect learning.
The Teaching Assistant (TA) job is typically filled by an upper-level university student or graduate student. It’s a job that requires one to play several different roles. First and foremost, the TA is a student and must complete all responsibilities to maintain this status. Second, the TA has a responsibility to the hiring professor. To the professor, the TA is the assistant and must abide
by the requirements set out by the professor. Third, the TA has a responsibility to the students in the class. The role here is that of teacher, tutor, and occasionally advisor.
There’s plenty of good research on study strategies that promote learning. It’s also well-documented that students don’t always use them. As most of us are well aware, procrastination gets in the way of learning. Cramming ends up being mostly a shovelling
exercise—digging up details and dropping them into short term-memory. But there’s also evidence that students don’t know that some strategies do more for learning than others. And guess what? Neither do some faculty.
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.
How do you teach the same concepts and skills to students with diverse abilities and interests? Different learning profiles? And how do you do that in real classrooms, with limited time to plan?
Recently, McGill University adopted its policy against sexual violence (PDF). While celebrating this development, I admit that well before this policy was drafted and adopted, I was skeptical about its utility. As a law professor who assesses rules and authority from a feminist critical perspective, I was doubtful about the potential of an institutional policy to address campus sexual violence. To my mind, a policy seemed like a naive and simplistic way of responding to the broad and complex challenge of sexual violence, which is rooted in forces that lie well beyond any single university’s control.