David Trick, Guest blogger Having occasionally chided my friends at universities and colleges for not knowing enough about each other’s systems, I should confess to one of my own blind spots: I have not paid enough attention to apprenticeship. For historical and institutional reasons, apprenticeship in Ontario is often seen as being outside the realm […]
Guest blogger: Carolyn Crosby About five years ago I had a student in grade 10 who told me his brother was in a college carpentry program and the first thing his college teacher said was: “Forget all the math they taught you in high school – it doesn’t apply here.” I couldn’t refute his statement […]
A recent Globe and Mail article pointed out that Canadian universities appear to be slipping in world rankings. This is not a good thing. Higher education institutions — because of the students they teach, the research and discoveries they make, and the communities they support — are some of the most critical public institutions in […]
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Martin Hicks – Wrenches and scalpels
I was thinking about this fall’s HEQCO conference “Hands on: Exploring apprenticeship and the skilled trades.” We are broadening our focus to embrace pieces of the postsecondary mosaic beyond public colleges and universities, and the conference is but one manifestation. And yet, even as we do so we are aware of a trade off (pun […]
We can puff out our chests with pride. The most current OECD numbers show that Canada still tops the charts for postsecondary attainment — number one in college attainment, number one in overall attainment for 25 to 64 year olds. And Ontario’s at the top of the heap in both college and university attainment for […]
In a recent blog we wrote that Ontario undergraduate tuition was around $4,000. At about the same time, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives said Ontario undergraduate tuition is $8,474. It’s a Star Trek episode with parallel universes. How does that happen? The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives didn’t make its numbers up. Statistics Canada […]
With summer’s end, more than a half million students are back at it in Ontario’s public colleges and universities, typically investing two to five years and thousands of dollars in everything from tuition fees to technology. For its part, the Ontario government contributes more than $5.5 billion to the public postsecondary enterprise. Given the magnitude […]
Last week, the Globe and Mail dissected Ontario’s latest annual university graduate survey results. Lead conclusion: “recent graduates of Ontario universities are doing worse on almost all measures of employment compared to those who graduated before the recession.” And more pointedly: “humanities graduates have been particularly affected, with their real earnings dropping steeply from what […]
Sharing the best in postsecondary news and commentary Back from vacation and I have a list of things to read that goes back a few weeks. So, here are just a few of the highlights: Clayton Christensen, of “disruptive innovation” fame, and Michelle Weise have written a new “mini-book” called Hire Education: Mastery, Modularization and […]