The key to graduating in four years (at least in the minds of many parents) is picking a major early and sticking with it. But a new report suggests students who change their major as late as senior year are more likely to graduate from college than students who settle on one the second they set foot on campus.
The report, published by the Education Advisory Board, a research and consulting firm based in Washington, D.C., challenges the notion that changing majors is keeping students in college past their intended graduation date and driving up their debt. Instead of looking at when students first declared a major, the EAB's study explored the connection between students' final declaration and how it affected their time to degree and graduation rates.
Each year, the Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE) presents the results of its annual survey. These results give community colleges objective and relevant data about students’ experiences at their colleges so they can better understand how effectively they are engaging their students and identify areas for improvement.
This year, the CCSSE report also includes results of the first administration of the Community College Faculty Survey of Student Engagement (CCFSSE), which provides insights into faculty perceptions and practices. Because many items on CCSSE and CCFSSE are aligned, the report includes side-by-Lori Gates side views of faculty members’ and students’ responses.
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.
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.
I was ready for a new challenge. But to leap from scholarship to administration is a big, and often one-way, move. The school really needed help. This wouldn’t be an easy assignment. My faculty friends said that I’d be giving up the professorial life that offered self-direction, flexible hours, and a cloistered world. Academic leadership is lonely and conflict-ridden. And my wife correctly foresaw the distractions, stress, long hours, and travel.
On the other hand, some of my prior work was quite relevant to the school’s needs. The issues at hand mattered a lot to me, and I wanted to rally others to them if I could. For every doubt, a reply came to mind. So I finally accepted.
All transitions are difficult. But there is no doubt that following a long-serving leader brings particular challenges. We tend to focus on the brief administrations that so many leaders in higher education are serving right now. We’ve all witnessed such short tenures -- leaders moving on to other opportunities or unfortunately encountering difficulties that result in other people making that decision for them. But among the key transition issues discussed less often are the challenges that occur at the retirement of long-serving leaders -- in many cases, the “founding” deans or directors of key organizations or departments.
One of us, Karen Gross, recently wrote an article about how co-presidencies could improve higher education, and it received no shortage of concern and criticism. To be clear, the article didn’t suggest that this type of governance was the ultimate solution for all that ails our educational institutions and their governance. It did not even hint at the idea that copresidencies are optimal or ever workable for many colleges and universities.
Are we in danger of losing the American Dream? The 21st-Century Commission on the Future of Community Colleges recently concluded that we are. Incomes are stagnating, the middle class is shrinking, and the prom- ise that every child has opportunity—the promise of upward mobility—is fading.
These downturns are associated with declining educational attainment rates in the United States relative to other developed countries—and with the fact that our nation’s distribution of education is as polarized as its distribution of wealth.
America needs a highly educated population to strengthen our place in the world market, grow our economy, and engage in our democracy. But we cannot have an educated workforce and citizenry if our current reality persists. Today, White students are earning college degrees at substantially higher rates than are both Black students and Latino students. We are also seeing a growing gender gap. Women have been outpacing men in undergraduate degree attainment since the mid-1990s. In 2011, U.S.
women surpassed men in the number of advanced degrees earned as well.
In 2018, Nova Scotian taxpayers will spend more than $400 million in support of universities, and another $26 million in student scholarships and bursaries.
The students themselves spend more than that amount on their share of tuition and fees. In addition, most of them study away from home and pay for food and accommodations in the city or town where they study.
Why are writing groups so difficult to sustain? How can they be cultivated and nurtured? We would like to share our
experiences of being a productive and successful writing group over the last seven years. We began with seven
non-tenured and/or contractual members who saw academic writing as an important process for developing research ideas and, consequently, for career growth. We also recognized that it was vital to have a circle of friends where everyone can receive supportive critique and informative feedback on their writing. Over the years, the group has grown to include 17 academics at all ranks and stages.
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.
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.
PowerPoint Presentation
This paper reports the results of an analysis of persistence in post-secondary education (PSE) for college students in Ontario based on the extremely rich YITS-B dataset that has been used for other recent studies at the national level. We calculate hazard or transition rates (and cumulative transition rates) with respect to those who i) graduate, ii) switch programs, and iii) leave PSE (perhaps to return later). We also look at the reasons for switching and leaving, subsequent re-entry rates among leavers, and graduation and persistence rates once switchers and re-entrants are taken into account. These patterns are then probed in more detail using hazard (regression) models where switching and leaving are related to a variety of individual characteristics, family background, high school outcomes, and early pse experiences. Student pathways are seen to be varied. Perhaps the single most important finding is that the proportion of students who either obtain a degree or continue to be enrolled somewhere in the PSE system in the years after entering a first program remains close to the 80 percent mark for the five years following entry. Seventy-one percent of students graduate within five years of starting, while another 6 percent are still in the PSE system.
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.
Ontario’s colleges share the provincial government’s belief that apprenticeship must play a greater role in addressing skills shortages and contributing to innovative, high-performance workplaces that enhance Ontario’s competitiveness.
At nearly all colleges and universities, online education is almost never mentioned in academic rules that judge faculty members and determine if they advance. If you teach online, you may do it for extra compensation -- called “overload,” pay above your basic salary -- or for the personal satisfaction of participating in what some believe is the next stage in the evolution of higher education. But teaching online may not be a wise move to further your academic career.
Teaching online can even be a dangerous career move, departing from the comfortable respectability of conventional classrooms for the exotic, suspicious digital world. In the hierarchy of status, if you teach online, do you compromise your position? Will your commitment to scholarship be questioned? Why would you go online when your future depends on publishing results of your research, not engaging in virtual instruction?
London, ON, February 23, 2018: When Canadians have the opportunity to go to school or access training while better balancing family responsibilities, they are better placed to find and keep good jobs. Making post-secondary education more affordable for Canadians is how we will continue to grow our middle class and strengthen our economy.
Before the pandemic descended and emptied its hallways, the Davis Building at the University of Toronto’s suburban Mississauga campus (UTM) was a busy hub of academic and social life, and the students walked with a briskness that matched the pace in any urban rail station. The campus’s Health and Counselling Centre (HCC) is just down a set of stairs, in the basement of the building. Last November, a young woman went there after struggling with feelings of being overwhelmed and anxious about living up to academic demands and grappling with unresolved trauma. Anushka* was experiencing suicidal ideation that culminated in a specific plan involving a bottle of pills that she carried in her backpack.
If we believe in the active-learning classroom — that the only way to bring about real learning is to engage students in ways that help them revise and broaden their thinking — then student participation is a non-negotiable part of the equation. Learning does not happen without the student actively taking part.
Oddly, however, given its importance, our own definition of “student participation” is often quite limited. In the scholarship on teaching and learning, that term is almost always defined narrowly as the degree to which students take part in class discussions. And while discussion is obviously an important component of an active-learning classroom, it’s not the only component. There are many other ways in which students participate in class: writing, researching, and contributing to small group activities are just a few. If we want to accurately assess and reward participation in our courses, we need to expand our definition to include more than just the amount of times that students raise their hands.
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.