Some of Ontario’s universities may have to reconsider their plans to expand master’s and PhD programs as the province tries to encourage the sector to focus on training students who graduate with skills that are in demand.
Over the next few months, the Liberal government will begin negotiations with the province’s universities that will ultimately lead to a higher portion of funds being linked to each institution’s outcomes, such as graduation or employment rates.
As part of those talks, the government will hold discussions on how and where it provides grants for graduate-level programs. In an earlier round of agreements, the province had agreed to support a certain number of spots at each university. Universities that have not yet attracted enough students to meet those targets will have to explain how they plan to fill the spots or face losing them to programs that are running at capacity, sources said.
According to data released by Statistics Canada in 2014, the years of 2000 - 2010 have seen significant increases in large
and private debt among graduating students, and skyrocketing private debt among graduates with doctoral degrees. Although
the percentage of graduates in debt appears to be decreasing overall in this decade, this is both because of the introduction
of the Canada Student Grants Program (which turns a portion of student loans into non-repayable grants) and because enrollment growth has outpaced increases in student loan borrowing. Even so, those who are borrowing are taking on much higher debts,
and increasingly from private sources.
Attraction and retention of apprentices and completion of apprenticeships are issues of concern to all stakeholders involved in training, economic development and workforce planning. The Canadian Apprenticeship Forum (CAF) has forecast that by 2017 there will be a need to train 316,000 workers to replace the retiring workforce in the construction industry alone (CAF, 2011a). In the automotive sector, shortages are expected to reach between 43,700 and 77,150 by 2021. However, shortages are already widespread across the sector, and CAF survey data show that almost half (48.1%) of employers reported that there was a limited number of qualified staff in 2011 (CAF, 2011a). Given this, retention of qualified individuals in apprenticeship training and supporting them through to completion is a serious issue. There is some indication that registration in apprenticeship programs has been increasing steadily over the past few years, but the number of apprentices completing their program has not kept pace (Kallio, 2013; Laporte & Mueller, 2011). Increasing the number of completions would result in a net benefit to both apprentices and employers, minimizing joblessness and skills shortages.
I got a job offer. Yay! But I only got one offer, and I’m a brand new Ph.D., so I assume I don’t really have the standing to negotiate anything. That’s only for people who have competing offers or amazing records, right?
This is one of the most common misunderstandings about negotiating. Every candidate has the potential to negotiate elements of a job offer. That’s true even if you have no competing offer, and are a brand new Ph.D. The only reason ever to hesitate on this front is if you’ve picked up red flags about the institution being one that possibly rescinds offers.
It happened seemingly overnight, but suddenly the education community is all a-Twitter. Or is it? That’s what Faculty Focus set out to learn when it launched in July 2009 a survey on the role of Twitter in higher education. The survey asked college and university faculty about their familiarity and use of the micro-blogging service, if any, as well as whether they expect their Twitter use to increase or decrease in the future.
That was the theme of third annual reconciliation forum, held at University of Manitoba.
More than 350 leaders from universities, colleges and Indigenous communities gathered at the University of
Manitoba for the third annual Building Reconciliation Forum. The theme for this year’s event, held on November 8
and 9, was “The Journey Toward a Reconciled Education System.”
In response to the 94 calls to action issued by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada in 2015,
educational leaders, academics, students and Indigenous people from across the country came together to share
what is currently being done at postsecondary institutions to make reconciliation a reality, and to discuss what still
needs to happen at the institutional level.
In recent years, we’ve been exposed to increasing amounts of headlines about the possibility of machines becoming more intelligent than human beings, and even wresting control over the planet from us entirely. These threatening predictions, which may or may not yet come true, are the result of significant developments in the computer science field called artificial intelligence (also known as AI).
For children in First Nations, Inuit and Métis communities across Canada, there is much to be positive about. Their communities are young: nearly a third of the total Indigenous population in Canada is under the age of 14, compared to 16.5% for the non-Indigenous population. Also, a characteristic of many Indigenous cultures is the centrality of children, which may be reflected in the active involvement of the community, and in support for families and parents. Youthfulness and a culture of respect for children are reasons for optimism and inspiration, but the effects of colonialism and the legacy of residential schools cannot be overlooked. These contribute to social and economic problems in many communities, impeding the ability of children to reach their potential as tomorrow’s leaders and decision makers. Statistics on virtually every measure of well-being such as family income, education, crowding and homelessness, poor water quality, and health outcomes
– reveal the serious disadvantages Indigenous children face compared to non-Indigenous children in Canada.
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.
Employability Skills Toolkit for the self-managing learner. Graphic presentation.
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.
This paper explores how community service-learning (CSL) participants negotiate competing institutional logics in Canadian higher education. Drawing theoretically from new institutionalism and work on institutional logics, we consider how CSL has developed in Canadian universities and how participants discuss CSL in relation to other dominant institutional logics in higher education. Our analysis suggests participants’ responses to competing community, professional, and market logics vary depending on their positions within the field. We see actors’ use of hybrid logics to validate communityengaged learning as the strategy most likely to effect change in the field.
Background/Context: PISA has come up with an ingenious solution to the problem of how to measure student achievement across national school systems with different curricula. Instead of measuring how well students learn what they are taught in each system, it measures a set of economically useful skills that no one teaches.
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.
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.
One of the most maddening things about contemporary book publishing is the niche that a new book is supposed to occupy. This niche is not an abstraction: it corresponds to the actual place where a book will land in the bookstore. Consider, then, an analytical book about contemporary parents: is it a parenting book, which will then end up next to the how-to book on toilet training? Maybe. But if the book doesn’t offer advice, some would say it doesn’t belong there. Then does it belong on the “sociology” shelf, where no parent will find it?
The present study used meta-analytic methodology to synthesize research on the relationship between student ratings of instruction and student achievement. The data for the meta-analysis came from 41 independent validity studies reporting on 68 separate multisection courses relating student ratings to student achievement. The average correlation between an overall instructor rating and student achievement was .43; the average correlation between an overall course rating and student achievement was .47. While large effect sizes were also found for more specific rating dimensions such as Skill and Structure, other dimensions showed more modest relationships with student achievement. A hierarchical multiple regression analysis showed that rating/achievement correlations were larger for full-time faculty when students knew their final grades before rating instructors and when an external evaluator graded students’ achievement tests. The results of the meta-analysis provide strong support for the validity of student ratings as measures of teaching effectiveness.
There is no substantial gap in what we need to know in order to improve schools and student learning and achievement on a very wide scale. In this brief paper I will (1) encapsulate what we obviously know; (2) what we should know but fail to understand (which thus makes finding the solution less likely); and (3) identify the action implications for teachers themselves, principals, district leaders, and system leaders.
As governments around the world struggle with doing more with less, efficiency analysis climbs to the top of the policy agenda. This paper derives efficiency measures for more than 8,600 schools in 30 countries, using PISA 2012 data and a bootstrap version of Data Envelopment Analysis as a method. We estimate that given current levels of inputs it would be possible to increase achievement by as much as 27% if schools improved the way they use these resources and realised efficiency gains. We find that efficiency scores vary considerably both between and within countries. Subsequently, through a second-stage regression, a number of school-level factors are found to be correlated with efficiency scores, and indicate potential directions for improving educational results. We find that many efficiency-enhancing factors vary across countries, but our analysis suggests that targeting the proportion of students below low proficiency levels and putting attention to
students’ good attitudes (for instance, lower truancy), as well as having better quality of resources (i.e. teachers and educational facilities), foster better results in most contexts.
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.