Canadian Students Abroad 2016
Canada’s Performance and Potential in International Education
International Students in Canada 2018
Canada is the second-largest country in the world. Ten million square kilometers stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific to the Arctic Oceans. While Canada’s wilderness is vast and diverse, most people in the country live in urban and suburban settings in regions
with dense populations.
The number of international students attending Ontario colleges and universities has increased every year since 2009, testament to the quality of Ontario’s institutions and the province’s well-earned reputation as a study destination of choice.
Today, international students account for over 15 per cent of all students enrolled in public postsecondary institutions in the province. 1 With this vibrant international student body comes the need for a renewed international postsecondary education strategy for Ontario: one mindful of the vital linkages between education, innovation and the economy, and puts students at the centre.
The debate over how universities and colleges should relate to one another has been lively in Ontario for at least two decades.
This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the commissioning of a province-wide review of the colleges’ mandate whose report recommended greater opportunities for advanced training – defined as “education that combines the strong applied focus of college career-oriented programs with a strong foundation of theory and analytical skills.” The report envisaged that some advanced training would be undertaken by colleges alone, and some would be offered jointly with universities and would lead to a university degree (Vision 2000 Steering Committee 1990, 16-17). A follow-up report in 1993 found that opportunities for advanced training remained “isolated and not part of an integrated and planned system of advanced training, with equitable
student access” (Task Force on Advanced Training 1993, 11-13).
The low-down about learning at Ontario’s 20 public universities, 24 colleges or 400+ registered
private career colleges.
Information for international students interested in attending college or university in Ontario.
I had coffee a few weeks ago with another displaced administrator at my university. Like me, he had arrived within the past decade to build something new and different. To some extent, he had succeeded. But, also like me, he had been informed that his leadership services would no longer be required beyond this year.
When he invited me, he asked if I would be uncomfortable meeting in one of the more popular campus coffee spots. "It’s in the shadow of the main administration building," he warned via email.
I had an experience recently that confirmed what I’d already suspected: I am no longer an early career scholar. Perhaps because of my age, or simply because I am pre-tenure, I had still considered myself to be "early" in my career until that moment.
It happened a week before my discipline’s biggest conference. As I was checking the online schedule for pre-meeting workshops, I found an intriguing one for "early career scholars of color." But after reading the agenda, I realized I wouldn’t benefit from the content. The lineup included sessions on developing career goals, publishing a dissertation, preparing for the job market, crafting a strong CV, negotiating a job offer, publishing your first book, finding a mentor. As an assistant professor, I’d already done those things. I read the list multiple times, searching, to no avail, for at least one applicable session. Then I posted on Facebook, asking the world: "When do you stop being an early career scholar?"
Research is reviewed in a rigorous manner, by expert peers. Yet teaching is often reviewed only or mostly by pedagogical non-experts: students. There’s also mounting evidence of bias in student evaluations of teaching, or SETs -- against female and minority instructors in particular. And teacher ratings aren’t necessarily correlated with learning outcomes.
This report explores undergraduate students’ involvement at The Ohio State University’s Columbus campus based on Student Life Survey data collected during Spring Semester 2016. The report focuses on differences between domestic and international students’ levels of engagement and belonging on campus. Specifically, this report examines students’ overall involvement in a range of co-curricular activities, their reasons for getting involved, their participation in different types of student organizations, their participation as student leaders and students’ sense of belonging at The Ohio State University.
Graduate students have embraced professional development as an integral part of their education, but what about their supervisors and departments? As part of an initiative to reduce completion times the school of graduate studies at the University of Toronto hosted a series of faculty development workshops to optimize supervisory mentorship in graduate student research progress and professional development.
There’s plenty of good research on study strategies that promote learning. It’s also well-documented that students don’t always use them. As most of us are well aware, procrastination gets in the way of learning. Cramming ends up being mostly a shovelling
exercise—digging up details and dropping them into short term-memory. But there’s also evidence that students don’t know that some strategies do more for learning than others. And guess what? Neither do some faculty.
More than six months after the Harvey Weinstein scandal catapulted sexual harassment to the top of the cultural agenda, academia is among the industries still grappling with the extent of the problem that it faces, and what to do about it.
A couple of weeks after the end of my first semester of teaching as the instructor of record, I received "the packet" in my campus mailbox — an interoffice envelope stuffed with course evaluations from my students. Those evaluations mattered a lot to me at the time, as I was still figuring out this whole teaching thing. Was I doing a good job? Did my students like the class?
And, more selfishly, did they like me?
Well, in this particular batch, one student certainly did not like either the course or me. In the comments section, the student flatly declared: "He was a real ashole."
The spelling in that quote is sic. In that moment — as I wrestled with both the shame of being
deemed an "ashole" and the urge to laugh at the absurdity of that being the sum total of this
student’s assessment — I had my first experience with a question that faculty members
regularly confront:
The transition from high school to university or college is one of the most stressful times in a young person’s life.
The late teens, early 20s are also the time in life when severe mental illness often reveals itself and when earlier mental-health issues – eating disorders, anxiety, depression and the like – can be exacerbated.
Suicide is a leading cause of death in this age group, second only to motor-vehicle crashes. “Every parent should know that this can happen to any family. We’re living proof of this,” says Eric Windeler, founder and executive director of Jack.org, which promotes mental- health advocacy by young people.
Last week, in my final rhetoric class of the semester, we did an end-of-term exercise that I’ve assigned for the past few years. I use notecards to write a series of prompts meant to encourage students to reflect on the semester and what they’ve learned. Each student comes to the front of the classroom, takes a notecard, and responds to the prompt in front of the class. There are also doughnuts.
Among the prompts is this one: "Before this class, I thought rhetoric was [fill-in-the-blank]. Now I think rhetoric is [fill-in-the-blank]." I got the format from Kimberley Tanner, who calls such prompts "retrospective post-assessments."
In spring 2018, overall postsecondary enrollments decreased1.3 percent from the previous spring. Figure1 shows the
12-month percentage change (fall-to-fall and spring-to-spring) for each term over the last three years. Enrollments decreased
among four-year for-profit institutions (-6.8 percent), two-year public institutions (-2.0 percent), four-year private nonprofit
institutions (-0.4 percent), and four-year public institutions (-0.2 percent). Taken as a whole, public sector enrollments (twoyear
and four-year combined) declined by 0.9 percent this spring.
Current Term Enrollment Estimates, published every December and May by the National Student Clearinghouse Research
Center, include national enrollment estimates by institutional sector, state, enrollment intensity, age group, and gender.
Enrollment estimates are adjusted for Clearinghouse data coverage rates by institutional sector, state, and year. As of
spring 2018, postsecondary institutions actively submitting enrollment data to the Clearinghouse account for 97 percent of
enrollments at U.S. Title IV, degree-granting institutions. Most institutions submit enrollment data to the Clearinghouse several
times per term, resulting in highly current data. Moreover, since the Clearinghouse collects data at the student level, it is
possible to report an unduplicated headcount, which avoids double-counting students who are simultaneously enrolled at
multiple institutions
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.
Abstract
Using data from two cohorts of Grade 12 students in Toronto, we examined whether the transition to post-secondary education changed between 2006 and 2011, particularly for under-represented groups. We used multilevel, multinomial logistic regressions to examine how the intersections of race and sex affect post-secondary transitions in the two cohorts. Our findings revealed that Black, Latino, and Southeast Asian students were less prepared for postsecondary education than White students. Students in these groups had lower than average GPAs, higher identification of special education needs, or lower
likelihoods of taking academic-stream courses. These differences remained fairly stable between 2006 and 2011. We did, however, find that Black students were more likely than White students to confirm a place in university in 2011—a significant difference. In contrast, Southeast Asian students experienced a decline in university transition but an increase in college confirmation. We also found that race and sex were important intersections for university confirmations in the case of Blacks and for college confirmations in the case of Southeast Asians. We contextualize our findings within the policy
climate of Ontario in the years spanning our two cohorts.