Over the last decade the global economy has become more competitive, and the jobs needed in that new economy have grown more technologically complex. As a result, educators, education researchers, and national and state policymakers have emphasized that students must graduate from high school “ready for college and career.” While college and career readiness has become the goal for all individuals, opinions have recently begun to differ about what college and—especially—career readiness actually means and how best to assess it.
Probing the question of the effectiveness and applicability of outcomes-based funding policy for higher education in Ontario requires an approach that (1) reviews current research and policy literatures on this topic and (2) differentiates and contextualizes the knowledge available. In order to evaluate successful and unsuccessful policy features and institutional practices, it is important to take stock of current policies across varied provincial, state, regional and national contexts,
as well as over time. The topic of outcomes-based funding has received considerable and continuing attention in the research and policy literatures, and syntheses of these are currently available (e.g., Dougherty & Reddy, 2011, 2013; Frøhlich, Schmidt & Rosa, 2010; National Conference of State Legislatures, 2013). However, a comprehensive policy-relevant perspective can only be a product of extended study that considers policy contexts internationally and provides an actionable, differentiated view on the research and policy in this area. This study will examine policy and research literature to address the following research questions:
With all the post-Harvey-Weinstein wringing of hands about why it takes so long for abuse to be revealed, especially when everyone clearly knows it’s happening, I was reminded of what my department head had said to me when I asked for a member of my dissertation committee to be removed:
"Please don’t ask me to do this. He’ll make my life miserable."
I had approached the chair for help after it became clear that this professor and I had an "unworkable relationship." Ditching him, another faculty member told me, was the only way I could finally finish a lagging doctorate. I’d even sought help from a therapist who told me, "He doesn’t seem to want to let you go," and added, "but you have to get away."
Ontario's colleges of applied arts and technology (CAATs) were granted authority to offer bachelor degrees in 2000, and the first degree programs were offered in 2002. The rationale for granted colleges permission to offer degrees was threefold: first it was to meet the needs of a higher skilled workforce in a changing economic, social and political environment; second, it was to widen access to degrees for Ontarians overall, but particularly for students from disadvantaged backgrounds who are more likely to attend a college than a university; and third, it was anticipated that college degrees would be less expensive than university degrees for students and governments (Skolnik 2016b).
A theory is a way of organizing ideas that makes sense of the world. A theory of action is a way of understanding the world in a way that identifies insights and ideas for effectively improving it.
This chapter is about a theory of action for whole system improvement in education. There are three conditions that such a theory must meet for the task at hand. First, it must meet the systemness criterion. Do the ideas stand a chance of addressing the whole system, not just a few hundred schools here and there? Second, our theory must make a compelling case that using the ideas will result in positive movement. We are talking about improvement after all — going from one state to another state. Third, such a theory must demonstrably tap into and stimulate people’s motivation. I ask the reader to keep these three criteria in mind in assessing the theory I am about to offer, and in comparing it with other competing theories of action. Thus, to what extent do other theories or mine measure up to the systemness, movement, and motivation criteria.
In 2011, as part of a comprehensive research agenda on learning outcomes development and measurement, the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) began supporting eight Ontario institutions to assess the generic skills acquisition of their students. This report summarizes the activities and results of the eight institutions that piloted the Council for Aid to Education’s Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), a written examination designed to assess the critical thinking and problem solving skills of entering and graduating students. It reviews the rationale for the project, the challenges and issues encountered with CLA test administration and implementation, and the institutions’ impressions of the value of the resulting data. While there is significant interest from institutions and programs in measuring the generic skills of students and understanding the amount of learning that can be attributed to the institution, the experiences of the institutions that participated in this project highlight certain administrative and methodological challenges that arise in the move from theory to practice in large scale assessments.
In the United States, slightly more than half of all students (51 percent) who begin university study complete their degree in their initial institution within six years. Though some students eventually earn their degrees via transfer to another university or college, it remains a fact that for many institutions in the United States dropout is often as frequent as graduation. Of course, universities and colleges vary considerably. Some elite private universities such as Harvard and Princeton graduate over 90% of their students and several very selective public universities such as the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Virginia, and the University of Michigan, graduate over 80% of their students. On the other hand, many open-enrollment universities, especially those in the large cities, graduate less than 30% of their students.
How often have you thought, “My people always tell me what’s really going on.”
Hundreds of leaders have told us that their followers are open with them. These leaders believed that they were getting honest feedback and were being asked the tough questions. Unfortunately, this is rarely true. In fact, we’ve come to think of this
common belief as a myth—a myth consistent with the concept of seduction of the leader, which was introduced to us more than twenty-five years ago by our colleague Dr. Rod Napier.
Included in this addendum are the fi ndings for the Noel-Levitz 2014 National Freshman Attitudes Report by race/ethnicity for incoming students. These data show the percentage of students within each group that agreed with each item.
One of the first things I saw this morning was a Toronto Star article concerning more First Nations kids taking their lives, and chiefs calling for help to deal with the suicide crisis. In conversation with a friend about it, she said to me “I wish I could help, but as a student I just don’t know how.”
Talking about it more with her, she expressed that she felt as if she couldn’t do anything because she’s non-Indigenous, but also far away both socially and physically from the issues at hand.
But that’s simply not true. It needs to be known that we are all treaty people, and reconciliation needs to be a national movement with 100 per cent of Canadians being a part of it, both non-Indigenous and Indigenous.
Everyone has a role to play, especially young people.
Digital resources are changing the ways students engage in learning and provide increased opportunities for student success. New technologies also provide improved assessment tools for measuring learning outcomes and student engagement. These benefits come without an additional cost burden to students.
The Ministry of Training, Colleges, and University’s (MTCU) recently released Tuition Fee Framework and Ancillary Fee Guidelines for Publicly-Assisted Universities (December, 2013) indicates support for the use of digital learning materials, including materials used in assessment. The new framework reflects a change in the Ministry policy concerning ancillary fees and enables the use of digital learning resources. This position paper explains Ontario universities’ support of MTCU’s new guidelines.
Dr. Auld welcomed the participants to our forum on college/university partnerships in Ontario.
Dr Auld suggested that in the future, historians of education will look at the current period as a watershed in the emergence of a new structure of higher education in Ontario. From the 1960s to the early 1990s, colleges and universities advanced their own agendas within a general framework of very significant growth. The community colleges had not been structured as an alternative route to university study; but even so, colleges began to develop linkages as students looked to extend their educational opportunities. Some of these linkages were formal, some not. Initially some colleges created links with American universities but by the mid 1990s sufficient interest developed between colleges and universities in Ontario toward credit transfer that the Government agreed to provide funding for the College-University Consortium Council. The mandate of CUCC is to conduct research on credit transfer both in Ontario and elsewhere, to develop and maintain a transfer guide and encourage the development of articulation. The environment continues to change as applied degrees for colleges have recently been approved and there is speculation that in the near future polytechnic institutions may appear.
This article describes the major findings from a longitudinal study of the impact of learning communities on the success of academically under-prepared, low-income students in 13 community colleges across the country. In this study, we employed both quantitative longitudinal survey and qualitative case study and interview methods. We utilized the former in order to
ascertain to what degree participation in a learning community enhanced student success and the latter to understand why and how it is that such communities do so. The findings strongly support adapting the learning community model to basic skills instruction to improve learning and persistence for this population.
How do changing economic conditions and uncertain market opportunities affect young adults’ transition from their undergraduate college years to adult roles and responsibilities? The Arizona Pathways to Life Success (APLUS) project is uniquely positioned
to answer this question. Launched in 2007, APLUS examines what factors shape and guide individual life trajectories — the pathways that young adults tread on their way to independence and self-sufficiency.
Any seasoned academic who has been involved with job searches knows there are two sets of criteria for some positions: the ones in the published ad and the "hidden" ones.
"The dean says we must hire a woman this time," reports the chair. Or the dean says: "The department’s lack of racial diversity is becoming a problem, you’ve got to fix that with this year’s search." Or the department’s star faculty member tells the chair, "If you don’t hire my spouse into a permanent line finally, we will take jobs elsewhere next year." All of those fall into the hidden-criteria column.
The following research reports detail the results of programs or inventions designed to increase the retention of post-secondary students. This bibliography is intended as a sample of the recent literature on this topic, rather than an exhaustive list. For inclusion, articles or reports generally described experimental research studies of PSE retention programs. Preference was given to larger scale projects focused on colleges in jurisdictions outside of Ontario (in several cases, progress reports from ongoing, large-scale initiatives were also included). Where possible, links to the original research are provided.
Since the 1960s, there has been growing and sustained interest in small-group learning approaches at the school level and in higher education. A voluminous body of literature in this area addresses theory, research, classroom practice, and faculty development. The approaches most highly represented in the literature are cooperative learning, collaborative learning, and problem-based learning (PBL). In this article, the authors compare and contrast these approaches through answering questions such as the following: What are the unique features of each approach? What do the three approaches have in common? How are they similar, and how are they different?
Some provincial governments are taking notice of and responding to growing public concern over student debt loads, economic and employment uncertainty, and the long-term ramifications being felt by students and their families.
These responses have not resulted in across-the-board fee reductions; provincial governments have largely preferred to go the route of directed assistance measures, either before (two-tiered fee structures or nearly-universal target- ed grants or bursaries) or after-the-fact (tax credits, debt caps and loans forgiveness) directed at in-province students as part of a retention strategy, and to mitigate the poor optics of kids being priced out of their local universities. While this does
impact in-province affordability, it undermines any commitment to universality because it creates a situation where the only students who leave the province to pursue a degree are the ones who can afford to.
The increasing number of exceptions and qualifiers makes the system of university finance far more difficult to navigate, and makes it harder to com- pare provincial policies. Additionally, the system becomes much more un- predictable. Financial assistance applied in this manner is anything but certain; programs can change or be eliminated at any time, while the only thing students can be relatively certain of is that fees will likely continue to increase.
PwC has been retained by Colleges Ontario to provide an independent assessment of the fiscal sustainability of the Ontario college sector over the next decade to 2024-25.1 To that end, we have analyzed the current fiscal condition of Ontario’s 24 public colleges (collectively referred to hereafter as “colleges”) and conducted interviews with senior executives at each college to augment our understanding as to how recent economic and demographic trends have affected colleges’ financial condition, as well as the challenges and opportunities they foresee, for their respective college, over the course of the next decade.
The first edition of The Challenge of Change was published in 1997. It turned out that this was precisely the year when the field of educational change began a major shift toward deeper action and large-scale reform.
The occasion was Tony Blair’s first term election in England in May, 1997. He came into power with a clear and explicit education platform in which literacy and numeracy were named as the core priorities. Blair and his government committed in advance to targets of 80% proficiency in literacy and 75% in numeracy for 11-year-olds — starting at a base of 62%. This was an enormous undertaking because it involved the entire system of 20,000 schools and a timeline of essentially four years.