TORONTO — Two Ontario colleges have opened campuses in Saudi Arabia that don’t accept female
students in their classes.
Niagara College offers tourism, hospitality and business courses at its campus in Taif, while Algonquin
College offers 10 programs, including business, accounting and electrical engineering technician, at a
campus in the city of Jazan.
In July 2016, the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) published Understanding the
Sustainability of the Ontario Postsecondary System and its Institutions: A Framework (Weingarten,
Hicks & Moran, 2016). The key messages of the report were:
1. Sustainability is about more than just money. It also relates to the quality of education and the academic experience institutions can offer.
2. The best sustainability regimes are those that look forward and are designed to predict future challenges.
3. Overcoming sustainability challenges requires collaboration between government and institutions.
The tools available are inextricably linked to other policies and practices, such as
enrolment planning, tuition policy, funding formulas, differentiation and institutional autonomy.
Student wellness is an essential component of academic success in higher education and subsequent opportunities in the labor market. The Ohio State University Office of Student Life’s Student Wellness Center uses a model that includes nine key dimensions of wellness: career, creative, emotional, environmental, financial, intellectual, physical, social and spiritual.
Best Practices in Measuring the Impact of Student Success Strategies
Discussions of Canada’s so-called ‘skills gap’ have reached a fever pitch. Driven by conflicting reports and data, the conversation shows no signs of abating. On the one hand, economic indicators commonly used to identify gaps point to problems limited to only certain occupations (like health occupations) and certain provinces (like Alberta) rather than to a general skills crisis. On the other hand, employers continue to report a mismatch between the skills they need in their workplaces and those possessed by job seekers, and to voice concern that the postsecondary system is not graduating students with the skills they need.
Current discussions about literacy often focus on how economic changes are raising expectations for literacy achievement. The emergence of a so-called knowledge economy or learning economy requires more people to do more things with print. Less attention has been given, however, to how the pressure to produce more literacy affects the contexts in which literacy
learning takes place. This article looks at the literacy learning experience of an autoworker turned union representative, a blind computer programmer, two bilingual autodidacts, and a former southern sharecropper raising children in a high-tech university town. It uses the concept of the literacy sponsor to explore their access to learning and their responses to economic and
technological change. Their experiences point to some directions for incorporating economic history into thinking about cultural diversity and for using resources in school to addresseconomic turbulence and inequality beyond the school.
I’d like to introduce you to Jennifer. Jennifer is 25 years old and is looking for a better job. She graduated from university in 2014 with a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology, spent a year overseas teaching English, and has been working at a coffee shop ever since.
Jennifer expected that the critical thinking skills she acquired in university, along with her work experience abroad, would help her land a ‘real job’, but so far, no luck.
Jennifer is not alone. According to Statistics Canada, the number of recent university graduates who are ‘underemployed’ is growing rapidly.
In 2011, 40% of women and 27% of men in the workforce, aged 25 to 34, had university degrees. This is up from 19% and 17% respectively ten years earlier. But, almost one fifth of these recent university graduates were overqualified for their jobs, and for Humanities Majors like Jennifer, the proportion goes up to about one third.
This study focuses on culturally endorsed implicit theories of leadership (CLTs). Although cross-cultural research emphasizes that different cultural groups likely have different conceptions of what leadership should entail, a controversial position is argued here: namely that attributes associated with charismatic/transformational leadership will be universally endorsed as contribut- ing to outstanding leadership. This hypothesis was tested in 62 cultures as part of the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) Research Program. Universally endorsed leader attributes, as well as attributes that are universally seen as impediments to outstanding leadership and culturally contingent attributes are presented here. The results support the hypothesis that specific aspects of charismatic/transformational leadership are strongly and universally endorsed across cultures.
The advent of online learning has created the medium for cyber-bullying in the virtual classroom and also by e-mail. Bullying is usually expected in the workplace and between students in the classroom. Most recently, however, faculty members have
become surprising targets of online bullying. For many, there are no established policies nor is training provided on how to react. The current research defines the problem, reviews the findings of a cyber-bullying survey, and explores recommendations for addressing cyber-bullying through policies, training, and professional development.
There has been a signifi cant growth in the number and types of degrees offered by a wider variety of Canadian post-secondary institutions. This expansion of degree access is the legitimate response to various forces, both social and post secondary. However, as a result, there has been some confusion regarding the meaning and value of the new degrees offered by the increasing variety of institutions. Several provinces are now recognizing this confusion through initiatives to “redesign”
their provincial post-secondary systems and this may ultimately reduce the diversity and the confusion. However, this paper examines the forces that have led to this proliferation of degrees and institutions and discusses the problems and controversies that are brewing regarding the recognition of these new degrees for further study and the proposals for system redesign. In particular, it is proposed that an examination of both the substance of various degrees and the nature of the institution offering the credential can provide a context for understanding the meaning of various degrees. Recommendations to help resolve the growing concerns in this area are provided for nonuniversity degree-granting institutions, Canadian universities, and for
provincial governments developing degree granting policies as part of system redesign initiatives.
With the rise in online and hybrid courses at the post-secondary level, many institutions are offering various online learning readiness assessments to students who are considering these instructional formats. Following a discussion of the characteristics often attributed to successful online learners, as well as a review of a sample of the publicly available online readiness surveys, an application of one representative tool is described. Specifically, the Distance Education Aptitude and Readiness Scale was administered in both hybrid and face-to-face sections of beginning post-secondary French across a two-year span. Differences in scores between groups, as well as the relationship between scores and grades are examined.
A meta-analysis of the transformational leadership literature using the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire
(MLQ) was conducted to (a) integrate the diverse findings, (b) compute an average effect for different leadership scales, and (c) probe for certain moderators of the leadership style-effectiveness relationship. Transformational leadership scales of the MLQ were found to be reliable and significantly predicted work unit effectiveness across the set of studies examined. Moderator variables suggested by the literature, including level of the leader (high or low), organizational setting (public or private), and operationalization of the criterion measure (subordinate perceptions or organizational measures of effectiveness), were empirically tested and found to have differential impacts on correlations between leader style and effectiveness. The operationalization of the criterion variable emerged as a powerful moderator. Unanticipated findings for type of organization and level of the leader are explored regarding the frequency of transformational leader behavior and relationships with effectiveness.
One of the many lessons learned from the early years of distance education is the fact that you cannot simply pluck an instructor out of the classroom, plug him into an online course, and expect him to be effective in this new and challenging medium. Some learned this lesson the hard way, while others took a proactive approach to faculty training. All of us continue to refine our approach and discover our own best practices.
In Germany, strong public and private investments in apprenticeship training have created a well-coordinated and functional
apprenticeship system. Its success renders the German apprenticeship system a model that other countries look to for ideas and inspiration. Nevertheless, German governments, businesses, employee groups, researchers, and other stakeholders continue to seek ways to improve the system.
President Obama’s goal is for America to lead the world in college graduates by 2020. Although
for-profit institutions have increased their output of graduates at ten times the rate of nonprofits over the past decade,
Congress and the U.S. Department of Education have argued that these institutions exploit the ambitions of
lower-performing students. In response, this study examined how student characteristics predicted graduation odds at a large, regionally accredited for- profit institution campus. A logistic regression predicted graduation for the full population of 2,548 undergraduate students enrolled from 2005 to 2009 with scheduled graduation by June 30, 2011. Sixteen independent predictors were identified from school records and organized in the Bean and Metzner framework. The regression model was more robust than any in the literature, with a Nagelkerke R2 of .663. Only five factors had a significant impact on log odds: (a) grade point average (GPA), where higher values increased odds; (b) half time enrollment, which had lower odds than full time; (c) Blacks, who had higher odds than Whites; (d) credits required, where fewer credits increased odds; and (e) primary
expected family contribution, where higher values increased odds. These findings imply that public policy will not increase college graduates by focusing on institution characteristics.
International students are valuable members of a university community, and bring a range of benefits to Ontario. These include economic impacts - contributing $2.9 billion to the provincial economy and creating just under 30,000 jobs1 – as well as contribu
ing to diverse and vibrant classrooms and communities.
The higher education world is getting smaller as more and more students are choosing to study abroad. Students are looking to universities to provide an international experience, the opportunity to study alongside students from all over the world, and to give them a truly global higher education community in which to study.
As part of the data collected for the World University Rankings, Times Higher Education asks all institutions to provide figures on the percentage of international students they have. THE has extracted these data and compiled a list of the top 200 universities.
Three of the universities featured in the top five were founded in the past 30 years – perhaps suggesting that younger universities are more appealing to international students.
Sixteen universities from London feature in the top 200, making it one of the most represented cities in the ranking. In fact, the UK as a whole was the most represented country with 72 universities present in the top 200 in total,
compared with 27 from the US and 22 in Australia.
So we put together this step-by-step guide to teach you exactly what to do to become a leader that employees love working with.
With major strides in access to postsecondary education for all students in recent decades, it is tempting to assume that such progress has erased disparities in college enrollment and completion in the United States. Yet despite having one of the highest college participation rates in the world, large gaps persist in terms of access to and success in higher education in this country, particularly for low-income, minority, and first-generation students.
Given the pressure to remain competitive in the global knowledge economy, it is in our shared national interest to act now to increase the number of students who not only enter college, but more importantly earn their degrees, particularly bachelor’s
degrees. Due to the changing demographics of the United States, we must focus our efforts on improving postsecondary access and success among those populations who have previously been underrepresented in higher education, namely low-income and minority students, many of whom will be the first in their families to go to college.
This story is featured in our 2016 Canadian Universities Guidebook, available on newsstands now. Pick up a copy of the guidebook for full profiles of 80 universities, insider reports written by current students on where to eat, study, and party, and the latest data including the grades needed to get into the school of your dreams and our definitive university rankings.
Information, it’s often said, is power. Yet when high school students are faced with one of the most important decisions of their lives—whether to attend college or university, and which course of study to take, in a sense they’re flying blind. “They’re going on anecdotal information,” says
Ross Finnie, a professor in the graduate school of public and international affairs at the University of Ottawa. That’s because there’s very little good data on how students perform in the labour market once they graduate, making it harder to “shop around” for a diploma or degree that will lead to a great job at the end. With a new initiative, Finnie hopes to change that.