Home

Informing the Future of Higher Education

Featured

Career Opportunities and Requests for Proposals

Career Opportunities Title: Research InternLocation: Remote, with possibility for some in-person meetings in TorontoDuration: 8 months (January 15th 2026 to August 14th 2026)Type: Full-time contract positionNumber of positions: One Research Intern The Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) is an agency of the Government of Ontario that brings evidence-based research to the continued improvement […]

Quick Stats

How many Ontario students applied to the province’s colleges and universities during the last decade? How many enrolled? How many graduated? Find the answers to these and other good questions in Quick Stats, a compendium of data on Ontario’s postsecondary system. Note: All visualizations begin in 2013 and go up to the most recent year […]

Latest

Categories

Alan Harrison — Skills, competencies and credentials: The stairway to heaven?

Longer ago than I care to remember, I went to a presentation given by Norm Wagner, who was at the time the president of the Corporate Higher Education Forum, after 10 years as president of the University of Calgary. Wagner talked about what employers look for when they interview students who had successfully completed undergraduate […]

Categories

It’sNotAcademic – The podcast: Episode seven with Tim Fricker

Welcome to the latest episode of It’sNotAcademic: the podcast – education conversations from HEQCO. Enrolment rates at Canadian universities and colleges have gone up considerably over the past two decades. That’s the good news. But, for a whole host of reasons, not all students who enrol in a degree or diploma program successfully complete it. […]

Academic Advising: Measuring the Effects of “Proactive” Interventions on Student Outcomes

More Robust Student Outreach Could Reduce Drop-out Rates First-year students who received repeated emails encouraging them to participate in advising services — particularly in group advising sessions — were less likely to drop out, finds a new report published by the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO). The study was conducted by researchers at […]

Categories

Harvey P. Weingarten — Undergraduate programs: Plus ça change…

I graduated from McGill University in 1974 with a B.Sc. in Honours Psychology. In a flight of fancy, I decided to see whether that program still exists and, if so, how the current program compares to the one I graduated from 43 years ago. These are the trips down memory lane one is increasingly inclined […]

Assessing Learning Outcomes: Thinking Critically about Critical Thinking and Written Communication Skills

Humber College examines the effectiveness of a new skills-assessment tool Students’ critical thinking and written communications skills show the most improvement when they are explicitly taught, according to a new study by the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) that examines the effectiveness of a new skills-assessment tool developed at Humber College. While the […]