By Alex Usher. Back in 2006, university Presidents got so mad at Maclean’s that they stopped providing data to the publication.  Recognizing that this might create the impression that they had something to hide, they developed something called “Common University Dataset Ontario” (CUDO) to provide the public with a number of important quantitative descriptors of each university.  In theory, this data is of better quality and more reliable than the stuff they used to give Maclean’s. More...

By Alex Usher. Yet at the federal level, we split up that responsibility among four ministries (warning: I have not yet bothered to learn the snappy new names the Trudeau government has bestowed upon departments).  In Canada, we have an Industry/Science Ministry, which plays a huge role in developing scientific careers, and fostering skills/knowledge through science-business relationships. More...

By Alex Usher. On Thursday, the Office of Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) released a report on the state of the Canadian labour market.  It’s one of those things the PBO does because the state of the labour market drives the federal budget, to some extent.  But in this report, the PBO decided to do something different: it decided to look at the state of the labour market from the point of view of recent graduates, and specifically whether graduates are “overqualified” for their jobs. More...

By Alex Usher. One of the more interesting policy debacles in higher education this year has been the fracas over tuition fees in South Africa, which has led to what some are calling the biggest set of anti-government protests since the end of apartheid. More...

By Alex Usher. There is something about research in modern languages (or English, as we used to call it) that sets many people’s teeth on edge, but usually for the wrong reasons.
Let’s go back a few months to Congress, specifically to an article Margaret Wente wrote where she teed-off on a paper called “Sexed-up Paratext: The Moral Function of Breasts in 1940s Canadian Pulp Science Fiction”.   Her point mostly was about “whatever happened to the great texts?”  Which, you know: who cares?  The canon is overrated, and the transversal skills that matter can be taught through many different types of materials. More...

By Alex Usher. Last week, the UK Minister for Business Innovation and Skills (which is responsible for higher education) released a green paper on higher ed.  It covered a lot of ground, most of which need not detain us here; I think I have a reasonable grasp of my readers’ interests, and my guess is that the number of you who have serious views about whether the Office For Fair Access should be merged into a new Office for Students, along with the Higher Education Funding Council for England, is vanishingly small. More...

By Alex Usher. Here at HESA towers, we’ve been doing some work on how students make decisions about choosing a university (if you’re interested: the Student Decisions Project was a multi-wave, qualitative, year-long longitudinal study that tracked several hundred Grade 12 students as they went through the PSE research, application, and enrolment process. More...

By Alex Usher. Universities Canada has some pretty clear guidelines about membership.  Point 4 says that a prospective member must have “… as its core teaching mission the provision of education of university standard with the majority of its programs at that level”. More...

By Alex Usher. A couple of quick notes about two interesting things from Universities Canada this week.
The first is the release of some public opinion polling, which they commissioned in the spring, regarding universities and other forms of higher education.  You can see the whole thing here, but I want to highlight a couple of slides, in particular. More...