Addressing financial and psychosocial barriers to retirement can benefit both faculty and their institutions.
About a third of tenured faculty age 50 or older expect to retire by “normal” retirement age, while fully two-thirds anticipate working past that age or have already done so. This latter group is sometimes called “reluctant retirees,” and when their numbers swell on campus, it can lead to productivity declines, limited advancement opportunities for junior faculty, a lack of openings for new hires, and difficulty reallocating institutional resources. To address a reluctant retiree pheno- menon and better manage faculty retirement patterns, college and university leaders need to understand the thought process among senior faculty regarding whether and when to retire.
The demand for faculty development is ongoing, and many medical schools will need to expand their pool of faculty
developers to include physicians and scientists whose primary expertise is not education. Insight into what motivates
occasional faculty developers can guide recruitment and retention strategies. This study was designed to understand the
motivations of faculty developers who occasionally (one to three times each year) lead faculty development workshops.
Canadian higher education has in the past few years succumbed to a mood of despair and defensiveness. Until just a few years ago, it was characterized by a confident, forward-looking energy, secure in the notion that it was the pre eminent engine of national development. Since then, we have seen our relative salaries decline; our plant, equipment, and libraries erode; our jobs threatened; and the value of our contribution to Canadian society severely questioned. A number of explanations could be given for this dramatic reversal of our fortunes, with emphasis ranging from demographics to poor public relations, from econo mic stagnation to short-sighted political manoeuvering. One popular explanation is that Canadian higher education is now Qustly) paying off debts it incurred in a Faustian compact with homo economicus. We financed our tremendous growth of yesteryear, this explanation purports, on promises of contributing substantially (or worse, by ourselves, delivering) u nprecedented economic growth and indus trial expansion. Now that industrial expansion has come to a standstill (and even
declined), the primary case for generous funding of higher education is at best called into question, and at worst severely u ndermined.
For those who accept this retributional explanation of the cause of the current crisis of finance and purpose in higher education, Global Stakes, will likely be perceived as one of the most exciting and optimism-creating books to come along in several years, and one which may galvanize a new sense of pu rpose and direc tion among the scientific and technological sectors of higher
education. Reactions to this book in the higher education community as a whole, however, are likely to be extreme. Others may dismiss it as merely self-serving advancement of a computer/electronics lobby or pandering to the wishful fantasies of engineering deans. Humanists and classicists may (for reasons suggested by the authors) be simply bewildered by it, or wonder if the cure advanced in this book is worse than the present illness in higher education.
Interested in becoming a scientific adviser? Here are some points to keep in mind from Quebec’s chief scientist.
For researchers, seeing that their work and expertise have contributed to the development of society is a source of immense satisfaction. To obtain such results, the research community needs to step up its efforts to ensure that the voice of science is indeed heard by the decision-makers who formulate public policy. But for some researchers,
operating in the political sphere would seem to require a quantum leap into an environment that does not obey the
laws of physics. And yet, many researchers today manage to provide scientific advice in parallel with their research
activities. Here are 10 points whose importance has been brought home to me in my six years as Quebec’s chief
scientist.
In the wake of student suicides, universities are reflecting on how to respond, and on their approaches to dealing
with mental health.
It can sometimes feel like the final days of a semester can’t come soon enough. Compounding that feeling, because
of where the Easter long weekend fell on the calendar this past academic year, the final exam period at the
University of Guelph ended on a Monday instead of the Friday before. Across the undergraduate residences,
advisers made extra efforts to check in with students to see how they were doing.
Readers of Faculty Focus are probably already familiar with backward design. Most readily connected with such
researchers as Grant Wiggins, Jay McTighe, and Dee Fink, this approach to course construction asks faculty to initially ignore the specific content of a class. Rather, the designer begins the process by identifying desired learning goals, and then devising optimal instruments to measure and assess them. Only thereafter does course-specific content come into play—and even then, it is brought in not for the sake of “covering” it, but as a means to achieve the previously identified learning objectives. Courses designed this way put learning first, often transcend the traditional skillset boundaries of their discipline, and usually aim to achieve more ambitious cognitive development than do classes that begin—and often end—with content mastery as the primary focus. Although the advantages of backward design are manifest, it’s probably still the exception to, rather than the rule of, course planning.
In recent years educators and policymakers have set a goal that students graduate from high school ready for college and careers. However, as a nation we are far from achieving this goal, particularly for low-income and minority students. For example, in states where all eleventh-graders take the ACT®, only 27 percent of low-income students in 2010 met the ACT College Readiness Benchmark in reading, with 16 percent meeting the Benchmark in mathematics, and 11 percent meeting the Benchmark in science.
Efforts to improve students’ academic preparation have often been directed at the high-school level, although for many students, gaps in academic preparation begin much earlier. Large numbers of disadvantaged students enter kindergarten behind in early reading and mathematics skills, oral language development, vocabulary, and general knowledge. These gaps are
likely to widen over time because of the “Matthew effects,” whereby those who start out behind are at a relative disadvantage in acquiring new knowledge.
Top motivations to study or train abroad remain the same as in recent years: the opportunity to live abroad and meet new
people, improve foreign language proficiency, develop transversal skills. Just after comes the wish to enhance employability abroad for more than 85% of students.
On average, Erasmus students have better employability skills after a stay abroad than 70% of all students. Based on their personality traits, they have a better predisposition for employability even before going abroad. By the time they return they have increased their advantage by 42% on average. While 81% of Erasmus students perceive an improvement in their transversal skills when they come back, 52% show higher memo© factors. In all cases, they consider the improvement of skills to be greater than they expected before going abroad.
This report covers the combined results for the summer 2014, autumn 2014, and spring 2015 Ohio State Graduation Survey administrations. An invitation to the Graduation Survey was sent to all undergraduate, Master's, and professional degree recipients who were scheduled to graduate in the summer, autumn, or spring terms of the 2014-2015 academic year.
As sites of work-force development, community colleges must be responsive to the demands of the rapidly changing job market. Now, many community-college systems are turning to job-market data that are more up to date and more precise than ever before.
The purpose of this study was to document the implementation of an intergenerational literacy program that incorporated authentic literacy activity with the goal of raising low-English literacy levels of the parent and the English emergent literacy levels of their non-English speaking young children.
The Innovation Skills Profile (ISP2.0) isolates the unique contribution that an individual’s skills, attitudes, and behaviours make to an organization’s innovation performance.
The Conference Board of Canada and the Centre for Business Innovation invites and encourages employees, employers, educators, students, government, labour, and communities to use the ISP2.0 as a framework for dialogue and action.
Collectively, the skills of individuals create an organization’s capacity to innovate.
I wrote about how usually, when it’s argued there is an “overproduction” of PhDs, “demand” for doctoral graduates is being implicitly defined by the number of tenure-stream jobs available while “overproduction” usually points to “not enough academic jobs for doctoral graduates.” So how do you define the demand for doctorates when we’re not just talking about faculty jobs anymore? I’d been thinking about this when I saw two recent articles from Brenda Brouwer, President of the Canadian Association for Graduate Studies (CAGS): one in University Affairs titled, “Canada needs more PhDs”—and a similar piece in the Globe and Mail, “Let’s end the myth that PhDs are only suited for the ivory tower”.
Have you ever witnessed a Ferpa freakout? Maybe you've had one yourself, as you worried about whether trying a new digital tool in class might violate the federeal alw that protects student privacy.
From November to March is prime time for academic burn-out in graduate programs — I’m convinced of that. Perhaps it’s a seasonal thing; it can be easy to sink into a trough of exhaustion and stress, and not climb out of it for months. But rather than just the seasonal doldrums, my sense is that clinical depression, extreme anxiety and other mental health issues are becoming more common in graduate programs as well as in undergraduate education.
I asked one fellow student her opinion of this, and she replied, “it seems like everyone I know in academia is depressed.” On another occasion when I was very unwell, I was told that “everyone” has some kind of breakdown during the PhD; my troubles were nothing to worry about!
Teaching. So many things have been said about teaching. "Good teachers know how to bring out the best in students." "A good teacher can inspire hope, ignite the imagination, and instill a love of learning." "A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops." Whoa. That is some heavy stuff right there. Makes being a teacher sound noble, important, and oh so awesome, does it not?
This paper presents an overview of the situation of youth in OECD countries since the onset of the financial crisis focusing primarily on describing the characteristics and living conditions of youth not in employment, education or training (the ‘NEETs’). It also provides data on the availability, coverage and effectiveness of income-support policies for young people, and
summarises available evidence on the impact of interventions that aim at improving the social, education and employment situation of the most disadvantaged youth. Due to the paper’s explicit focus on the hardest-to-place, most disadvantaged youth, the range of policies covered is broader than in earlier studies on the same topic, including various social benefits and in-kind services targeted at this group. The paper shows that NEET rates have not yet recovered from the crisis. There are large differences in youth unemployment and inactivity across countries, and these differences were further exacerbated by the recession. Reducing NEET rates is a great challenge for governments, as youth who remain jobless for long periods typically come from more disadvantaged backgrounds, have low levels of educational attainment, and are in many cases inactive. There is substantial evidence, however, that even the most disadvantaged youth can benefit from a varietyof targeted interventions, including for instance special education programmes and mentoring.
In their aptly named book on organizational management, Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton write about Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense. A hard fact is something for which there is solid evidence. A dangerous half-truth is when this fact is superficially applied. And total nonsense is often the outcome of not knowing the difference.
We can gain insight about the current state of school leadership by applying this organizational thinking to two of education’s hard facts: The principal is crucial to school success, and professional learning communities are more effective than individual professionals working in isolation. In doing so, we should remember that the danger in the half-truth is not just that it is incomplete or misleading, but that its proponents are unaware that it is not true.
Not only did the Great Recession place many people in the unemployment line, it also led to declining access to full-time jobs. Underemployed workers comprise those who want a job but don’t have one as well as those who want a full-time job but only have a part-time job. Now, five years into the recovery, underemployment has declined to less than 10 percent from its peak of 17 percent during the recession. College graduates’ rate of underemployment has declined from 10.2 percent to 6.2 percent today. That is much lower than the 13 percent underemployment rate of high school graduates.
The Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance (OUSA) recognizes the importance of attracting more international students to study in Ontario, as articulated by the Ontario government in its Open Ontario Plan. In a competitive global environment, international students enable the province to train and retain highly skilled individuals, provide access to a greater pool of talent, diversity and ideas, and contribute to the economy. This paper provides an overview of six areas of significant importance to undergraduate domestic and international studen are in need of greater attention by institutions and the provincial government.