By Jules Knox. About 270 students from Africa will have the opportunity to receive a Canadian education because of a new partnership among three of the country’s top universities and the MasterCard Foundation.
Over the next 10 years, the foundation is providing the University of British Columbia, the University of Toronto and McGill University with $25-million each to educate African students in Canada. The program will pay for students’ tuition and living expenses, including pocket money, and set up internship opportunities for them back in Africa. Read more...

By David Kent. It’s the one-year anniversary of the Black Hole moving over to University Affairs. Jonathan and I are very pleased with the added exposure and it’s been a real treat to work with Léo, Peggy and company over the last 12 months – Happy Anniversary! We hope that our readers have enjoyed the content and that they continue to follow along and contribute with excellent comments and guest posts. Another important message attached to this summary, though, is for postdoctoral fellows to help inform the policy that governs their status, salaries and future opportunities in Canada by filling out the CAPS postdoctoral survey. Last week, I wrote a UA news article on its importance and encourage you all to read through it and forward to your postdoctoral colleagues (including international postdocs in Canada and Canadian postdocs abroad!). Read more...

By Bonnie M. Patterson. A looming skills shortage in Canada is grabbing its share of headlines and reigniting the debate about what’s better – a college or university education? Colleges are wonderful training grounds for our skilled workers. Their more recent work delivering highly applied college degrees with a skills focus makes a valuable contribution to increasing demands for credentials to meet the needs of today’s workplaces. But historically – and it still holds true today – the majority of jobs created in the market place require a university education. Ontario’s Ministry of Training Colleges and Universities’ own statistics show that 70 per cent of jobs in the coming years will require a university degree.
And that’s why universities have responded with more than 500 agreements to help college students easily move into university degree programs. It’s also why universities believe in the important work of a new organization in Ontario, ONCAT, whose mission is to build even more bridges – bridges from apprenticeships to college diplomas, diplomas to diplomas, diploma to both college and university degrees, and finally university degrees to specialized college training – it’s all good stuff.
A recent analysis by the CIBC reinforces the value of a university education. The study shows jobs in the near future will be created to address labour shortages in health care, natural and applied sciences, management, as well as mining and engineering. The vast majority of these jobs require a university degree. Statistics Canada data shows that 700,000 jobs for university graduates were created between July 2008 and July 2012, compared to 320,000 for college-only graduates.
University graduates find jobs faster than those with only a college diploma – 87.5 per cent of university graduates are in jobs within six months of graduation. For college students, that figure is 83 per cent. And university graduates are better off in terms of lifetime premium earnings to the tune of more than $1.3-million. That’s good for the individual and good for government revenue, which benefits from taxes collected on those earnings Universities are not traditionally job training institutions, although they have always produced extraordinary graduates from such professional programs as law and medicine, business and architecture.
Even their non-professional programs produce graduates who get jobs. And in more recent years, universities are fostering innovation and producing entrepreneurs who create jobs for themselves and others. We often hear complaints that our universities are turning out too many history grads, and what good is a philosophy degree when it’s time to get a job. But the reality is that there are philosophy graduates running financial institutions, there are history graduates in politics and public policy, there are english graduates in management positions.
Some of those graduates didn’t go immediately into the job market; some went on to do graduate studies, some crossed over into college, perhaps to take some training in communications or media relations. The fact that people want to augment their learning to make themselves more marketable is a good thing. If universities have done their job well, they will have prepared our young people for lifelong learning, where they will pop back in and out of our colleges and universities or industry training programs as their own appetite for knowledge and the job market demands it.
This is why universities are offering a wide range of programs at their faculties of continuing education. And it’s why universities are working more closely than ever with colleges and postsecondary partners around the world. For some, getting a job isn’t only about learning a skill at college. It isn’t only about learning a core discipline at university. Getting and staying in the job market can be about both. Read more...

By Nicola Koper. A few weeks ago, I blogged about funding graduate students using scholarships. This week, I’ll talk about students who are funded in other ways. I suppose this blog is focussed on students who do certain types of research; some, presumably, can complete their dissertations with nothing more than a laptop (our society’s substitute for a pencil and a library), while others require such sophisticated equipment that there could be no thought of bringing in students without ensuring that research funding was firmly in place first, and where costs of additional students are incremental relative to overall research costs. Nonetheless, there is a significant middle ground in which more students mean greater research costs. Further, many of us are approached by students with good research ideas but no funding to realize these ideas. There are a range of opportunities for supporting such students, and of course, an equally broad range of problems and associated headaches. Read more...