Most graduate students and postdocs know they should give serious thought to their next career steps, but they aren’t sure how to navigate the career exploration process. After all, for those with doctoral training, there are a dizzying array of possible career “destinations” both inside and outside academe. Collecting information about even a few of those options can quickly become overwhelming and hard to sustain along with your current job.
Collège Boréal has a dual mandate: to be a postsecondary college institution and a vital community development organization. Collège Boréal is a hub of education, innovation, culture, and community serving a diverse francophone clientele: Franco-Ontarians, French immersion students, immigrants, French-speaking First Nations and Métis persons, and international students, among others. Its purpose is to produce a highly skilled bilingual workforce that is active in French-speaking communities and contributes to the economic, social, and cultural vitality of the province and country.
The following statements are part of the College’s 2010-15 Strategic Plan:
Vision
To foster knowledge and stimulate culture.
Mission
Collège Boréal provides a high-calibre personalized education to a diverse clientele and practises community leadership to foster the sustainable development of the francophone community of Ontario.
How much of a difference does it make whether a student of a given academic ability enters a more or a less selective four-year college? Some studies claim that attending a more academically selective college markedly improves one’s graduation prospects. Others report the reverse: an advantage from attending an institution where one’s own skills exceed most other students.
Using multilevel models and propensity score matching methods to reduce selection bias, we find that selectivity does not have an independent effect on graduation. Instead, we find relatively small positive effects on graduation from attending a college with higher tuition costs. We also find no evidence that students not attending highly selective colleges suffer
reduced chances of graduation, all else being equal.
Mission
•
Confederation College inspires learners to succeed in their lives and careers in Northwestern Ontario and beyond.
Vision
• Confederation College will enrich lives through learning.
We set out to determine whether hybrid delivery of a college program could facilitate completion of an apprenticeship. We found unanticipated complexity in the answer. The hybrid program delivered completion rates and average student grades that were comparable to those in a program delivered entirely in the classroom, but in only half the required time. However, we found that performance in the in-class portion of the program was not always linked to apprenticeship completion. The factors affecting completion are varied, in part because different stakeholders place a different value on completion.
LAMBTON COLLEGE VISION/MANDATE
Lambton College fosters innovation and entrepreneurship among our faculty, staff, and students, and in the local and global communities we serve. As the sole provider of higher education in our region, and as a mobile learning college, we are committed to providing teaching and learning excellence in a broad range of program offerings, and a full range of credentials in alignment with our areas of specialization.
It should be noted that our Strategic Mandate was developed within the context of the Lambton College Strategic Plan, and was developed and received with and by the Lambton College of Applied Arts of Technology Board of Governors.
The Ontario Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology (CAATs) were founded in 1965 as a vehicle to increase access to post-secondary education, to address the needs of learners not served by the university system, and to meet local economic and community development needs. The CAATs have been highly successful at fulfilling their mandate, with 24 institutions currently serving 220,000 fulltime and 300,000 part-time students. This level of enrolment represents a 100% increase over the past 28 years.
This report examines community colleges from the perspective of the faculty who deliver their public service – high quality post-secondary education and job training. The report is based on conversations with over 600 faculty at all 24 CAATs, along with historical research and present-day inquiry into the sector’s financing, management, and operations. The report is focused primarily on perceptions by college faculty that there is a crisis of quality within the college system today.
Change seems to be the new constant regarding our country’s educational systems – at every level. Major changes in K-12 are, in part, a result of the new Common Core, which is intended to eliminate the need for developmental education. The standards of the new Common Core are excellent and seem to align with and exceed the “college-ready indicators” assessed on current college placement tests. However, developmental education is not going away anytime soon.
The latest Ontario government survey of graduates from undergraduate programs shows 94 per cent have secured employment two years after graduation. The average salary for university bachelor’s degree graduates in full-time jobs was $49,001 two years after graduation, up from the average $42,301 six months after graduation.
The survey of Ontario university students who graduated in 2012, conducted for the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities, concludes that university graduates get jobs related to their education. The best path to career success for Ontario students is still a university degree.
International students have increasingly become an important part of postsecondary education in Canada. The number of international students has risen 84% between 2003 and 2013, and most precipitously since Canada introduced the
Canadian Experience Class as part of its new immigration policy changes.1 A report published by the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (Williams, K., Williams, G., Arbuckle, A., Walton, Roberts, M., & Hennebry, J., 2015) describes the political
and economic climate, as well as the policy changes over that time period. These changes have allowed for an increase in the number of international students being admitted into Canada’s post-secondary institutions by streamlining application
processes and revising policies regulating off-campus work and post-graduation work permits. Students from India and China have had greater ease in accessing Canadian post-secondary education with the introduction of the Student Partners
Program (SPP) in 2009, though financial restrictions have become a potential barrier to access.2 With these changes, according to Williams et al., Ontario has become the primary destination for international students in Canada. This is especially
true at Ontario colleges. “Ontario-bound international students show a growing tendency to study in the college sector, with over 50% of new entrants attending a college in 2012” (Williams et al., 2015). Despite this trend, the discussion on student
characteristics does not distinguish between the two sectors.
Koichiro Matsuura, Director-General of UNESCO, asserts that education is one of the most effective instruments that society can employ in the effort to adopt sustainable development. This paper is a first effort to explore the degree to which Canadian institutions of higher education, including colleges and universities, have embraced this assertion. It includes the first census
of the existing environment/sustainability policies and/or plans of Canadian postsecondary institutions (n = 220), and an examination of the relationships between the existence of an environment/sustainability policy/plan and the presence of other sustainability initiatives on campus. The focus on policies and plans is timely because in public institutions like colleges and universities, actions and practices are determined by policy. The results reveal a number of patterns and insights, including, for example, the influence of provincial legislation on the uptake of policies.
There are a number of studies that classify governing boards into different types. Some classifications are based on management form. Some are based on the form in which authority is exercised. Some are based on the form of institution that the board serves. Most of these classifications include "working boards" but few offer a clear definition of them. Even those that
do attempt to define this type of board acknowledge that little is known about how they actually function. This study examines a small public not-for-profit institution with a "working board" to determine how that type of board functions, where it succeeds and where it fails, and how it is different from other types of boards.
Despite recent innovations, it remains the case that most students experience universities as isolated learners whose learning is disconnected from that of others. They continue to engage in solo performance and demonstration in what remains a largely show-and-tell learning environment. The experience of learning in higher education is, for most students, still very much a "spectator sport" in which faculty talk dominates and where there are few active student participants. Just as importantly, students typically take courses as detached, individual units, one course separated from another in both content and peer group, one set of understandings unrelated in any intentional fashion to what is learned in other courses. Though there are majors, there is little academic or social coherence to student learning. It is little wonder then that students seem so uninvolved in learning. Their learning experiences are not very involving.
Key Word: Tinto
Failure in one way or another, is likely unavoidable. The experience can take on different meanings for each of us, but the feat behind is something we all share, Moments of failure are typically viewed as poor performances. A teacher attaches a grad to an assignment or test, and the course often continues, in spite of the fact that a number of students have not mastered a significant portion of the material.
Background/Context: With a growing body of evidence to support the assertion that teacher quality is vital to producing better student outcomes, policymakers continue to seek solutions to attract and retain the best educators. Performance based pay is a reform that has become popular in K–12 education over the last decade. This strategy potentially produces positive impacts on student achievement in two ways: better alignment of financial incentives with desired outcomes and improved the composition of the teacher workforce. While evaluations have primarily focused on the former result, there is little research on whether the
longer term implementation of these polices can attract more effective teachers.
This draft framework has been approved by the Committee of Presidents of the 24 publicly-funded colleges. In approving this template, the presidents recognize that individual colleges may need to make changes to reflect local circumstances during the development of their stand-alone sexual violence and sexual assault policy and protocol. In doing so, the colleges have committed to retaining as much consistency with the template as possible to reflect a similar style, tone, and format that will help
students and others easily access information they need no matter which college they approach.
Quality post-secondary education (PSE) is an overlooked and often unseen factor in the promotion of the spiritual, emotional and physical well-being of First Nations and Inuit peoples. The numbers back this up; on average, First Nations and Inuit peoples have lower PSE achievement levels, higher rates of unemployment and lower incomes than non-Aboriginal people. In addition to educational and economic advantages, higher educational attainment levels have been shown to be related to improved health and a better standard of living. Therefore, the promotion of increased post-secondary education for First Nations and Inuit peoples is by default promoting an invigorating, fortifying future for Aboriginal people, families and communities.
Sexual violence is an ongoing concern in post-secondary educational environments. It is “any violence, physical or psychological, carried out through sexual means or targeting sexuality” and includes sexual abuse, assault, rape and harassment (Ontario Women’s Directorate, 2013, p. 3).
Canadian institutions and governmental bodies have made efforts to address sexual violence on campus. For instance, the Ontario Women’s Directorate (2013) created Developing a Response to Sexual Violence: a Resource Guide for Ontario’s Colleges and Universities and the Canadian Federation of Students-Ontario (2013) released a Campus Toolkit for Combating Sexual Violence. Student groups, universities and colleges have implemented prevention programs such as US-based
Bringing in the Bystander™ and Green Dot, as well as awareness campaigns such as Got Consent? and Draw The Line (Banyard, Plante, & Moynihan, 2005; University of New Hampshire, 2014; Senn & Forrest, 2013; University of Windsor, n.d.; Coker et al., 2011; Green Dot etc., 2010; Sexual Assault Support Centre at the University of British Columbia, n.d.; Ontario Coalition of Rape
Crisis Centres, n.d.). Grassroots and community-directed efforts such as the It’s Time to End Violence Against Women on Campus Project have also made strides toward addressing and preventing campus sexual assault (Sexual
Assault Centre of Hamilton & Area & YWCA Hamilton, 2014).
A 1975 research article by Vincent Tinto,“Dropout from Higher Education: A Theoretical Synthesis of Recent Research,” spurred more than twenty-five years of dialogue on student retention and persistence in higher education. Though it has been attacked by some and re- vised by Tinto himself, his work has remained the dominant sociological theory of how students navigate through our postsecondary system.
More than a quarter century later, the issues of student retention and persistence are as pertinent as they were when Tinto first published his student integration model. In the 1970s and 1980s, public policy was focused primarily on access, with federal and state legislation aimed at reducing barriers to higher education. By the mid-1990s, the discussion moved from access to issues of choice, affordability, and persistence. Although gaining entry to col- lege is still a dramatic accomplishment for some, persisting to degree is what really matters in the postcollege world. Unfulfilled academic goals often result in unfulfilled career realities:
lower pay, less security, fewer opportunities, and dreams deferred—if not abandoned.
Within the span of 20 years, tuition as a source of operating revenue grew from 18 percent in 1988 to 37 percent in 2008.1 The most recent financial reports show tuition alone made up 45 percent of universities’ operating budgets in 2014—51 percent when fees are included—compared to the provincial government’s 43 percent contribution.2 As tuition continues to increase the affordability, accessibility, and accountability of a university education are put at risk. Our Tuition policy sets out students’ priorities for addressing their short and long term concerns with regards to the tuition framework and tuition payment processes.