By Léo Charbonneau. The report released last week by CIBC World Markets on the returns of a postsecondary education in Canada continues to make headlines – and, I think, is an interesting object lesson on the perils of higher-education reporting.
The report’s release was well-timed for maximum publicity, falling on the eve of students returning to college and university. It also fits the narrative that seems to be increasingly current in the Canadian media that the value of a degree in fields such as the humanities and social sciences is declining, as epitomized by columnists such as the Globe and Mail’s Margaret Wente (a good example is a piece she wrote last year, entitled “Educated for unemployment”). More...

By Mark Kingwell. It’s back-to-school season, which is why U.S. President Barack Obama took a moment, in the midst of the Syrian gas-attack crisis, to propose a solution to the debt crisis in American postsecondary education. Speaking at the University of Buffalo in mid-August, Mr. Obama promised to create an alternative ranking system for colleges and universities, based not on selectivity or facilities, but on concrete outcomes such as graduation rates and postconvocation earnings. More...

By Marina Adshade. Hundreds of thousands of students will be heading to university for the first time this week and the majority of them will be women. By the time this first year class dons cap and gown the gender imbalance will be even greater; if the trend from recent years continues, and there is every reason to believe that it will, four years from now there will be 156 female graduates for every 100 male graduates. More...

By James Bradshaw. When York University begins advertising to hire new professors this fall, the job descriptions will have an important distinction: The new hires will focus on teaching, and will not be required to do research like their colleagues. York’s plan to bring in about 200 such faculty over several years is one of the most expansive of the initiatives at Canadian universities over the past several years to introduce a new breed of faculty member – the teaching-focused professor. Under growing pressure to improve teaching quality, due in no small part to constrained funding and swelling class sizes, more than a dozen schools of all sizes across Canada, with some notable exceptions, have gradually created a permanent teaching stream. More...

By Brian Lee Crowley. Student debt and education savings plan. These two issues are on the minds of many Canadians this week as universities roll into another academic year. Many students are contemplating the debt load they will take on to earn their degree, while parents weigh the forgone income that goes into savings plans for postsecondary schooling. More...

By Gary Mason. Thousands of young Canadians headed off to university this week, many worrying about the amount of debt they were amassing in the process. The often meagre amounts saved from summer jobs don’t come close to paying for a year at school. And unless they have parents helping them out, loans are essential. If you’re in graduate school, lines of credit from a bank are often needed to cover costs. More...

By Gavin Moodie. Ontario has been considering whether and how to differentiate its universities since 2010 when its deputy minister of Training, Colleges, and Universities, Deborah Newman, commissioned a study, The benefits of greater differentiation of Ontario’s university sector from the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario. HEQCO’s most recent contribution, A data set to inform the differentiation discussion, released in July, is both helpful and unhelpful in advancing the discussion. While it is an example of differentiation informed by data, it ignores its own admonition in its report three years ago by grouping Ontario universities on only one dimension, research intensity. More...