Blog Educpros de Pierre Dubois. Poissons d’avril: photos et quiz
Cinquième occasion pour le blogueur, depuis 2009, de s’adonner aux poissons d’avril. Quelques pistes pour ce 1er avril 2013.
1. Geneviève Fioraso retire son projet de loi.
2. La Ministre congédie, pour conseils inadéquats, les membres de son cabinet, ex-présidents d’université.
3. Avant le débat au parlement sur son projet de loi, rendez-vous de la Ministre avec Valérie Pécresse, Laurent Wauquiez, Patrick Hetzel, députés UMP: « donnez-moi des arguments pour faire passer la LRU 2. »
4. L’association des proviseurs de lycées à classes préparatoires organise un colloque sur la réforme d’ensemble du premier cycle de l’enseignement supérieur: « la création d’Instituts d’enseignement supérieur (IES) est-elle une alternative crédible? »
5. L’association des Régions de France conteste les contrats de site: « nous ne voulons pas être les payeurs, en lieu et place de l’État. »
Plutôt que des poissons d’avril sur l’enseignement supérieur et la recherche, quelques histoires et photos de poissons. Quiz (photos 1, 2, 3): quels sont les verriers, sculpteurs de ces poissons? dans quel musée peut-on admirer leurs créations? Photos 4 et 5: barbecue mémorable en août 2012, maquereaux à la moutarde. Le blogueur peut en fournir la recette simplissime.

By Melonie Fullick. A recent post by David Naylor, the President of the University of Toronto, has been quite popular with academics and has generated a lot of commentary. Naylor makes the argument that Canadian higher education is dogged by “zombie ideas”, and he describes two of them: the first is that universities “ought to produce more job-ready, skills-focused graduates [and] focus on preparing people for careers”. The second is the idea that research driven by short-term application or commercialization, should be prioritized by universities because it provides a better return on governments’ funding investments. I focus here on the first point, since in the past few weeks, in the run-up to the federal budget on March 21st, there has been a great deal of coverage of the alleged “skills gap” in in the Canadian workforce. Others have already done the work of summarising this issue, but as a quick recap, the argument goes something like this: business leaders and employers in Canada complain (to the government) that they cannot fill positions because candidates lack the skills. Read more...

By Max Blouw. The role, the cost, and the funding of post-secondary education have been hot topics of debate lately.
Given our wider economic context, much of the discussion has fixated on an overly simple question: What is the best route to a good job — university or college?
This question is certainly a lively conversation starter, but it is too narrow to assess the full value that a post-secondary education provides to the individual and to society. It also paints a distorted picture of the university-college relationship, suggesting that one is better than the other and that students have only an either-or choice. Read more...

By Mike Savage. Proud to be mayor of an education hub. This essay is adapted from an address that Halifax Mayor Mike Savage gave in February to a meeting of university government relations officers and communications directors, convened in Ottawa by the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada.
As a member of parliament for seven years and, until 2011, chair of the Liberal Post-secondary Education and Research Caucus, I had the privilege of traveling around Canada and learning about our universities and colleges through meeting presidents, other leaders, students, professors and researchers. I was very lucky to have learned about, and worked with, universities and colleges as an MP, and am indebted to many for their patience and time. But as I considered running for mayor of Halifax, I began to see postsecondary institutions through a somewhat different lens, a wider lens. Read more...

Universities hold the keys to economic vitality, says Doug Rothwell, and Michigan is shining a light on exactly how.
In today's knowledge economy, there is growing recognition that colleges and universities are powerful stimulants of economic growth. The talent, research and development, and economic activity they produce are valuable public goods worthy of both private and public investment. The obvious question, however, is this: how can colleges and universities show they are delivering healthy investment returns? We think we have the beginnings of an answer: Michigan's performance tracker for public universities. As a roundtable of business leaders located in the US midwest, Business Leaders for Michigan asked higher education and economic partners what we'd expect to see in a credible investment report. We came up with about 30 different measures of productivity, efficiency, affordability, access, and economic impact. Read more...

By Garry Marr. Getting an education is all well and good, but students have to be realistic about the debt they take on to do so.
Just because the youth unemployment rate is double that of the general population doesn't mean education is a waste of money, but it's easy to understand why students might think so. The Canadian Federation of Students says the average graduate hits the workforce with a debt load of $27,000. It doesn't help that tuition is rising faster than inflation, climbing another 5% this academic year, according to Statistics Canada, while inflation has been well below the Bank of Canada's 2% target. Read more...

By Rebecca Schuman. Thomas L. Friedman’s breathless New York Times column on the potential of massive open online courses envisioned remote villages in Egypt enthralled with lectures on Plato and nuclear physics, and thereby a large-scale democratization of what used to be the purview of the privileged few: higher education. Friedman did mention the online revolution’s potential disadvantages—“Yes,” he conceded, “only a small percentage complete all the work, and even they still tend to be from the middle and upper classes of their societies.” But the general tone of the piece betrayed giddy anticipation for the gleaming new delivery model of education that will arise from the rubble of the old Ivory Tower. The blowback to Friedman’s piece in the professorsphere was considerable (and Richard Wolff’s rejoinder one of the best reads). And this has prompted Friedman to publish a second column in praise of the MOOC, one that doubles down on his earlier assertions with the added bonus of ad hominem insults to the professoriate. Read more...