Over the last twenty years, the public—through the federal government—has spent an increasing amount of money on student financial aid and education-related financial incentives. Driven by rising tuition and ancillary fees (coupled with stagnant middle-income earnings), the cost of pursuing post-secondary education has led an increasing number of low- and middle-income Canadians to rely on these programs. Each developed separately and at different times, the Canada Student Loans Program (CSLP), Canada Student Grants Program (CSGP), Registered Education Savings Plan (RESP), and education-related tax credits (Education and Tuition Fee Tax Credits [TFTC] and Student Loan Interest Credits [SLIC]) now cost the public over $4.2 billion each year, with an additional $2.5 billion given out in loans.
School leaders are faced with the daunting task of anticipating the future and making conscious adaptations to their practices, in order to keep up and to be responsive to the environment. To succeed in a rapidly changing and increasingly complex world, it is vital that schools grow, develop, adapt and take charge of change so that they can control their own futures.This paper will examine the tension that exists for school leaders in relation to data about their schools and their students, arguing that the explicit connections between data and large-scale reforms make it impossible to avoid a critical approach to data, drawing on research in Ontario and Manitoba in Canada, and examining parallels with evidence from research in England, to highlight the challenges involved in using data effectively in different political contexts and mandated policies on the uses of data.
Working with, not on behalf of students with disabilities.
Whatever the budget or maturity level of a given educational institution, there is a trend toward putting assessments online. With this comes new opportunities, but also new challenges. In a recent webinar hosted by edWeb.net, administrators from the Hampton
Township School District in Pennsylvania point out that there is a wrong way to do online assessments. Here are a few of their top tips for making sure you do them the right way.
What are the key factors associated with attrition specifically at a Canadian community college?
Since 1977, we’ve been recommending that graduate departments partake in birth control, but no one has been listening,” said Paula Stephan to more than 200 postdocs and PhD students at a symposium in Boston, Massachusetts, in October this year. Stephan is a renowned labour economist at Georgia State University in Atlanta who has spent much of her career trying to understand the relationships between economics and science, particularly biomedical science. And the symposium, ‘Future of Research’, discussed the issue to which Stephan finds so many people deaf: the academic research system is generating progeny at a startling rate. In biomedicine, said Stephan. “We are definitely producing many more PhDs than there is demand for them in research positions.”
The provincial government is taking steps to address the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada's (TRC) Calls to Action regarding education and training, including introducing mandatory Indigenous cultural competency and anti-racism training for every employee in the Ontario Public Service (OPS) and implementing mandatory learning expectations in Ontario's public education system curriculum.
Canada needs more university, college and trades graduates. In order to compete in the new global knowledge economy, we have to equip all Canadians to achieve their potential and contribute to a prosperous Canada.
Consider the following two scenarios: Scenario No. 1: Having sat through the entirety of a search committee’s deliberations, a trustee on the panel seeks to invalidate its work — accusing two other committee members of having a conflict of interest because they are colleagues of an internal candidate who has become one of the two finalists. Those relationships had been discussed openly within the committee but conveyed to the full governing board only after the finalists had been named. The mere accusation compels the board to reject the finalist pool and restart the search from the beginning. The result: considerable disruption and delay, not to mention the damage done to the institution’s reputation in the hiring market.
This article was written in response to concerns that have been expressed about the possible consequences of an increasing number of countries overtaking the United States in educational attainment. International statis-tics on educational attainment were analyzed, questions about comparabil-ity of data were discussed, and the impact of different approaches to the organization of higher education on attainment rates was examined. The author concluded that comparing the rate of attainment of subbaccalaure-ate credentials between the United States and other countries is proble-matic both because of definitional issues, and as a consequence of the major transfer function of American community colleges. The article explains how colleges that previously offered short term vocational training in many European countries have evolved into vocationally-oriented bacca-laureate granting institutions that have enabled their nations to achieve rapidly rising levels of baccalaureate degree attainment. It suggests that the experience of these countries may provide useful lessons—and cautions—for policy makers and educational leaders with respect to expanding the role of community colleges in awarding baccalaureate degrees.
A look at some UCASS data from 1970 to 2016.
Last year, Statistics Canada released University and College Academic Staff System survey data for the first time in five years. (The survey had been scrapped in 2012 and revived in 2016.) This data on full-time faculty at 112 universities and colleges offers an important snapshot of Canada’s professoriate (read more about the latest results here).
The UCASS survey goes back to 1937, but 1970 is the earliest date for a continuous time series.U niversity Affairs took a closer look at this data, starting from 1970, and the resulting six charts tell a partial history of Canada’s full-time faculty over nearly five decades (no data was available from 2011 to 2015 while UCASS was on hiatus).
Becoming a new faculty member is seldom easy. Whether the instructor is simply transitioning to a new university or stepping into the classroom for the very first time, there are questions large and small that arise every day about policies, procedures, techniques, and technologies. For online instructors, many of whom teach only part-time, this sense of disorientation
is made even more difficult by their off-site location and the growing list of tools and technologies they need to learn in order to create a rich learning environment.
THE PAUCITY OF WOMEN IN SCIENCE HAS BEEN documented over and over again. A 2012 Report from the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology reported that a deficit of one million engineers and scientists will result in the United States if current rates of training in science, technology, math, and engineering (STEM) persist (President’s Council
of Advisors on Science and Technology, 2012). It’s not hard to see how this hurts the United States’ competitive position—particularly if women in STEM meet more gender bias in the U.S. than do women elsewhere, notably in India and China.
Research in commercial organizations has provided a multitude of examples on how leadership development can effectively foster employees’ performance and work-related attitudes such as commitment or satisfaction. In contrast, to date systematic leadership development is largely lacking for employees in higher education. However, we suggest that the positive effects of leadership development in commercial organizations also apply to the academic context. Thus, the purpose of this applied article is to present two approaches to the development of
leadership in higher education. More specifically, we provide a detailed description of two different programs offered to researchers at a large German university. The first program constitutes a leader development initiative for junior faculty on an individual level, whereas the second focuses on the development of leadership within university departments on a group level. We provide recommendations for establishing and evaluating effective leadership development in higher education.
If we see a colleague with a fever, we say “go home and rest.” Why can’t we treat mental illness with the same understanding?
Today, I want to revisit the story David told in his last post. Someone he knew collapsed, became addicted to crystal meth and ended up homeless. We all wonder after such a story – could this have been prevented? Overall, it is difficult to provide a single answer and there is no one person to blame but I hope that after reading the list below, you will feel like you can help (even if it is only in a small way).
If any part of the university should understand leadership, it would be the business school. Not only do the faculty research leadership, they also impart this knowledge to undergraduate and graduate students, as well as participants from across the globe in a variety of executive education programmes.
Recent commentary on the appointment of Grant Devine to the board of the University of Saskatchewan misses an
important question: What, exactly, qualifies an individual to serve on a board? Public exchanges have focused on
partisan issues or on Mr. Devine’s career, including his PhD and his knowledge of agriculture, without reference to
whether any of these things are needed for the U of S board to be effective.
Our research on governance leads us to make three observations that could guide such processes and reduce
future controversy.
Gemmell grew up on a berry farm in Stirling, Ont., watching his father fx or create whatever equipment he needed with whatever materials he had. It was a childhood that stoked his own passion for industrial design. (He once built an insulated dog house for the family pet, complete with a Plexiglas room with a view.) But when his portfolio of “backyard inventions” wasn’t enough to earn him a spot in the industrial design program at Carleton University, Gemmell ended up on a 13-year trek through life and higher learning. He earned a bachelor’s degree in visual arts and psychology at Brock University, worked for a year as a web designer in Toronto, but “wasn’t really feeling it,” so he spent a year in Whistler, B.C. snowboarding, and teaching snowboarding, until he ran out of money.
I come not only to praise Kathleen Wynne, but also to bury her. The auspices for her government are so dire that a eulogy today hardly seems premature. Writing it now lets us imagine what settled opinion in the future, freed from the toxic fog of the current campaign, might make of Wynne and her six-year premiership.
Certainly four years of Premier Doug Ford will be more than enough to clear the air. But even before that, I suspect Wynne will emerge in hindsight as the bold leader of the most capable and effective government Ontario has enjoyed since the heyday of the fabled Big Blue Machine. She will be remembered as the best of her generation, representing Ontario at its
best.
This report maps learning outcomes associated with three Ontario advanced diploma programs in Business (Accounting Administration, Human Resources Administration, and Marketing Administration) in order to determine whether these credentials are equivalent to baccalaureate degrees in an international (European and American) context. In so doing, it draws on recent discussions of learning outcomes in both Ontario and the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), particularly with regard to the Bologna Process. It also provides more information for current Ontario debates about the positioning of the three-year advanced diploma.