By Linda Nguyen. Students create their own job opportunities. Phil Jacobson thought getting a business degree would help open doors on Bay Street. He didn't expect it would also help him become a big wig on Main Street.
"I figured, out of all the undergrad possibilities that were out there, a business degree would position me as the most well-rounded coming out of school," said the 22-year-old president and co-founder of mobile app PumpUp.
"So I could either start something or get a great job and just have those good skills."
After graduating last summer from Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ont., Jacobson decided that his dream wasn't to get poached by a big financial firm. Instead, he wanted to continue working for himself. And he's not alone. Although there are no statistics on how many university students become employers or self-employed after graduation, in recent years, Canadian universities have begun to update their curriculum to support an increasing number who want to work for themselves once they finish school. Traditionally, post-secondary institutions mainly focused on teaching students the skills needed to get hired by someone else. Read more...

By Diana Mehta. There's a battle brewing in the world of Canadian academia. On one side stands Access Copyright, a collective which has provided institutions access to a pool of protected intellectual work for more than two decades while distributing royalties to the writers, artists and publishers it represents.
On the other is a group of universities who no longer feel the need to pay for the services offered by the collective, opting instead to navigate the world of intellectual property rights without a middle agent. Simmering tensions are now threatening to boil over as Access Copyright takes one of Canada's largest universities to court — a move some see as a warning to others who've ended relations with the agency.
Access Copyright is claiming Toronto's York University, which opted out of an agreement with the collective, has improperly been reproducing and authorizing the copying of protected works. The issue goes beyond a single institution though. Read more...

By Alan Shepard. It’s a “tsunami”! Or a “Copernican revolution.” So say the president of Stanford and other university leaders. Not since the turn of the last millennium have so many people rung the doomsday alarm. This time it’s not the end of the world we’re worrying about, but the disintegration of undergraduate university education as we know it. To which I say – maybe. It’s clear we’re in a collective frenzy about the future of higher education, and the frenzy is likely to accelerate. Governments seek more accountability for the billions of tax dollars we all contribute. Students still seek transformative educations as well as job skills. Families seek access. Faculty seek meaningful engagement with students in an era that has opened up university education to the greatest percentage of any population in history. In our own ways we all seek “value for money,” that awful phrase that lays bare the economics of one of the most profoundly human of experiences – the joy of getting an education. Read more...

Findings from the latest ACT National Curriculum Survey®, released today, point to a continued gap between what high schools are teaching and what colleges expect their incoming students to know. ACT’s report, which focuses on the policy implications of the survey results, suggests this gap may indicate a lack of alignment between high school and college curricula that could be contributing to the nation’s college and career readiness problem. The survey results show more than three times as many high school teachers as college instructors believe their students are prepared to succeed in college courses.
“When high school teachers believe their students are well prepared for college-level courses, but colleges disagree, we have a problem,” said Jon Erickson, ACT’s president of education. “If we are to improve the college and career readiness of our nation’s high school graduates, we must make sure that our standards are aligned between high school and college. States have raised expectations by increasing educational standards over the past few years. This report provides an important reminder that we also need to bring school curricula up to the same heightened expectations.”
The vast majority (89 percent) of high school teachers surveyed by ACT reported that their students are either “well” or “very well” prepared for college-level work in their subject area after leaving their courses. In contrast, only around one fourth (26%) of college instructors reported that their incoming students are either “well” or “very well” prepared for first-year credit-bearing courses in their subject area. These percentages are virtually unchanged from those in ACT’s 2009 curriculum survey. Read more...