Since the 2015 election, the Liberal government has made two major adjustments to federal programs targeted at children and youth. First, the uniform payment to every family with children was replaced by the new Canada Child Benefit, a benefit worth more to lower income families and withheld from the wealthy. In a similar vein, the government announced it would phase out some of the existing tax credits for post-secondary education (PSE), which were available to all families with taxable income, so it could use the savings to increase the value of grants for students from low-income families.
A message in bold and italics emblazons the home page of the Lakehead University Student Union food bank’s
website. “We are in desperate need of food!!!” it reads. “Any amount that you can give would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks to everyone who helps out!!!” The page urges students at the Thunder Bay, Ont., school to get in touch if they
have “an emergency need for food.” The urgency of the post reflects a troubling new trend on university campuses. As
post-secondary education costs continue to rise, students are finding it increasingly difficult to afford food. Across the
country, food-bank visits are up, and a new study shows almost half of 450 students surveyed at Lakehead lack food
security.
To strengthen pathways to college completion, many in higher education are zeroing in on improving completion rates among transfer students—a growing undergraduate subpopulation on campuses of all types.
To support this effort, this report looks beyond transfer students’ test scores and grade point averages at a range of “non-cognitive” attitudes that infl uence their motivation, engagement, persistence, and college completion. The report is based on student survey responses drawn from a sizable sample of transfer students enrolled at four-year and two-year institutions from 2010 to 2012.
The 2015-16 academic year was one of numerous student protests demanding increases in the admission of
minority students and the hiring of minority faculty members -- not to mention numerous other measures to promote
inclusivity on campus.
But what exactly do students want? While some would say that the various lists of demands of campus protests
provide much of the information, two Dartmouth College professors disagree. On Tuesday they proposed on the
political science blog The Monkey Cage a new way of measuring student interest in different forms of diversity. And they tested their system on students at Dartmouth, an admittedly nontypical student body given that the college is highly competitive in admissions.
A fraternity member from the University of Oklahoma is videotaped chanting a racist song. At the University of Missouri, a slow response to racial slurs and graffiti fueled protests and led to the resignation of top administrators. At Bowie State University, a
swastika was spray-painted on the Martin Luther King Jr. Communications Art Center. Other incidents on campuses ranging from Yale University and Ithaca College on the east coast to Claremont McKenna College in California, led to campus protests and calls for change.
All of this and more occurred in 2015, leading the Washington Post’s Michael E. Miller to conclude “Whatever you call it, what’s clear is that unrest is spreading across American universities. One by one, campuses are lighting up with protests, demonstrations and — in a handful of cases — death threats, plunging the country into a broader debate about lingering racism
more than half a century after the Civil Rights Act.”
To be sure, today’s college students are helping to shine a spotlight on race, cultural differences, and the need for more inclusive, respectful campuses. It’s no surprise that faculty play an important role.
The push-back was strong when we sought to increase the diversity of teachers through a modified admissions policy in our education degree program.
The makeup of the Canadian population is changing rapidly. The percentage of the population who identify as Indigenous is increasing; the percentage of new immigrants who are from racial, ethnic or linguistic minority groups is growing; those who identify as LGBTQ are feeling increasingly safe to be open about their identities; and individuals with disabilities are making dynamic contributions to Canadian society. Although our communities are becoming increasingly diverse, the makeup of the teaching profession remains relatively stagnant, with white, female teachers making up more than 80 percent of the teaching force. While our communities are becoming richer with diversity, the teaching profession is not.
The MOOCs frenzy that was sparked by a few elite US institutions in 2012 alerted universities worldwide to the opportunities and threats of online learning (Daniel, 2012). As higher education faces up to this new reality, 'blended learning' has become the most common term for institutional strategies to address it. 'Blended' is a conveniently flexible word that can be applied any mixture of classroom activity and online instruction, although 'blended teaching' would be a more accurate descriptor of the evolving institutional approaches to course delivery. How students really learn is more mysterious (Israelite, 2015).
Three years ago, Schreiner University recognized a need for nursing education in south central Texas. Many registered nurses at local hospitals lacked a bachelor’s of science in nursing -- a degree that would open the door to higher salaries and greater responsibilities.
Schreiner decided to address this issue by building an online nursing program. There was just one problem: the private university didn't have the internal expertise and start-up capital to create such a program.
“I want to be able to engage in the grand calling of a Socratic teacher, which is not to persuade and convince students, but to unsettle and unnerve and maybe even unhouse a few students, so that they experience that wonderful vertigo and dizziness in recognizing at least for a moment that their world view rests on pudding, but then see that they have something to fall back on. It's the shaping and forming of critical sensibility. That, for me, is what the high calling of pedagogy really is.”
Diversifying the professoriate has long been a priority on many campuses, and such goals have only grown more urgent in light of recent national and local discussions about race. Yet college and university faculties have become just slightly more diverse in the last 20 years, according to a new study from the TIAA Institute. Most importantly, as faculty jobs have become more stratified with the growth of non-tenure-track positions over the same period, most gains for underrepresented minority groups have been in the most precarious positions. That is, not on the tenure track.
Ontario is awarding a total of $51 million to support world-class studies and research talent at leading institutions across the province, laying the foundation for Ontario's future knowledge-based economy.
This funding will help sharpen Ontario's competitive edge by fostering discoveries; leading to new technologies, treatments and cures for cancer patients and other diseases while supporting high quality, knowledge-based jobs for Ontarians. It will also drive the province's ability to attract and retain the best and brightest research talent.
This report provides parliamentarians with an assessment of the state of the Canadian labour market by examining indicators relative to their trend estimates, that is, the level that is estimated to occur if temporary shocks are removed.
To provide additional information on labour utilization that may not be captured by typical indicators for younger workers, PBO also examines how the educational credentials of younger university graduates match their occupational requirements.
In the national conversation about career opportunities for Ph.D. candidates, we hear a lot of dialogue about faculty
resistance and solutions for how faculty members can become more supportive of students considering wider career options. What we don’t hear as much about is student resistance to career exploration. I recently met with a student who told me he had no intention of considering anything but faculty jobs. He told me it was a waste of his time to take on any work during his program that was not teaching or research, since he was going to be a professor.
Maybe they didn’t think of this back in 2006 when the province scrapped
mandatory retirement.
Ten years later, baby boomers in big numbers are blowing past the old
retirement age of 65, some working into their 70s.
They can defer pensions for a while, but at 71, they’re forced to collect work
and government pensions along with their paycheques.
Who would want to work that long? You might be surprised.
Maybe they didn’t think of this back in 2006 when the province scrapped mandatory retirement.
Ten years later, baby boomers in big numbers are blowing past the old retirement age of 65, some working into their
70s.
They can defer pensions for a while, but at 71, they’re forced to collect work and government pensions along with
their paycheques.
Who would want to work that long? You might be surprised.
Wish I had a dollar for every speech intoned by corporate leaders and politicians alike about the human capital needs of the so-called “learning society” or the “knowledge economy”. Cradle to grave learning is the key to a healthier, safer, more just and prosperous future for all of us. That’s what we’re told. And it’s all true. But public policy lags well behind the Alice in Wonderland rhetoric. “Jam yesterday, jam tomorrow but never jam today,” said Alice. Even in Ontario, with a Premier so committed to education, achieving a seamless continuum of effective learning implied by the learning society vision, remains elusive.
Almost fifteen ago, I received a “the job is yours” call and the chance to serve one of Canada’s most important and
enduring legacies, Joseph E. Atkinson’s crusades for social and economic justice.
As I prepare to pass the torch as Executive Director of the Atkinson Foundation, the advantage of 20/20 hindsight has led me to reflect on lessons learned about how to change the world, particularly through strategic philanthropy.
I joined the Foundation at the beginning of 1996, when the board was seeking a new approach to social change.
The goal was to move from receiving proposals for “good works” to becoming a proactive organization, working with
partners to advance evidence and ideas about how the future could be more just.
Two organizations have recently made themselves more than eligible to be inducted into the hall of shame when it comes to the sexual abuse of powerless children. And the negligent bystanders who knowingly ignore the immorality of it all and those who spend too much energy on not knowing, continue to be a large part of the problem.
College characteristics that may be associated with sexual victimization have become a salient topic in popular and
scholarly discourse. However, very little research has formally tested these relationships. Utilizing the Online College
Social Life Survey, a dataset that includes 22 schools and approximately 16,000 women respondents, a logit analysis is used
to measure relationships between risk of different types of sexual victimization (namely, attempted physically forced
intercourse, drug- and alcohol-facilitated sexual assault, physically forced intercourse, and unwanted sex because of verbal
pressure) and student body size, school-level sex ratio, school selectivity, the type of school (public or private), and the
percentage of students involved in Greek organizations on campus, all while controlling for individual-level characteristics
and clustering standard errors at the school level. Each additional thousand students enrolled increases the odds of a
physically forced rape by 2.47 times. The odds ratio for being a private institution ranges from .65 to .7, whereas percentage
Greek shows opposing associations with individual-level Greek membership for physically forced rape. All other variables
are statistically insignificant. These results suggest that institution-level factors play some role in the risk of sexual
victimization; future research should expand on these findings.
How often have you thought, “My people always tell me what’s really going on.”
Hundreds of leaders have told us that their followers are open with them. These leaders believed that they were getting honest feedback and were being asked the tough questions. Unfortunately, this is rarely true. In fact, we’ve come to think of this
common belief as a myth—a myth consistent with the concept of seduction of the leader, which was introduced to us more than twenty-five years ago by our colleague Dr. Rod Napier.