By Brenda Brouwer. The overarching principle at Queen’s is to support students in completing high-quality work in a reasonable time frame. As noted in the column “Queen’s plan to change its graduate policy needs more study,” published on March 27, the Graduate Studies’ Executive Committee (GSEC) at Queen’s University recently approved revisions to our policy on time-to-completion for graduate students. I would like to respond to some of the issues that were raised in that piece.
The old policy, which had not been updated in many years, stated that students had five and seven years from the time of registration to complete Master’s and PhD degrees, respectively, with no mention of mechanisms to safeguard that students were progressing to completion prior to these time points. The revised policy reflects the standard program lengths approved by the province for full-time registration, which is two years for a Master’s and four for a PhD. It also acknowledges that many factors contribute to the time in which a degree is completed. Read more...

By Rosanna Tamburri. Desire2Learn, one of Canada’s technology success stories, can trace its roots directly to a university classroom. On a recent monday morning, the fourth-floor lobby of Desire2Learn Inc. is crowded with the newest crop of co-op students ready to start their work term. Located in Kitchener, Ontario, in a late 19th-century beige-brick building that once housed a tannery and maker of leather saddles, the company’s open-concept offices are lively with groups of young employees engaged in conversation. Free cafeterias are located throughout the building, and of course there are the ping pong and football tables now de rigueur at any high tech firm worth its salt. Read more...

By Tom Campbell. Senate suggestions that now might be a good time to consider the elimination or consolidation of one or more of the UNC 16-campus system drew immediate and passionate opposition, some calling it a war on public universities. William Link, in his biography of Bill Friday, reminds us the current UNC System was born in controversy. Winds of change in higher education started in the late 1950s. The 1931, three-campus structure gave way to six campuses in the early 1960s, then ultimately the approval of the current 16-campus system in 1971. In the intervening years North Carolina saw education wars never before experienced: regional jealousies, gubernatorial and legislative intervention, parochialism from existing schools, political infighting and governance struggles abounded. If this wasn’t warfare the differences were largely semantic. Read more...

By Kyle Spencer. ALONG his block in Newark’s West Ward, where drugs are endemic and the young residents talk about shootings with alarming nonchalance, Najee Little is known as the smart kid. He got all A’s his sophomore year, breezing through math and awing his English teachers. His mother, a day care worker, and father, who does odd jobs to make ends meet, have high aspirations for him. They want him to earn a college degree. So last year, when Bard College opened an early college high school in Newark for disadvantaged students with dreams of a bachelor’s degree, he was sure he’d do well there. He wrote his first long paper on Plato’s “Republic,” expecting a top grade. He got a D minus. “Honestly,” he recalled, “I was kind of discouraged.” Read more...

By MICHAEL BARBER, KATELYN DONNELLY and SAAD RIZVI. Our belief is that deep, radical and urgent transformation is required in higher education as much as it is in school systems. Our fear is that, perhaps as a result of complacency, caution or anxiety, or a combination of all three, the pace of change is too slow and the nature of change too incremental.
We need an inspired generation, all of whom are well-educated and some of whom are able to provide the bold, sophisticated leadership that the 21st century demands. We need citizens ready to take personal responsibility both for themselves and for the world around them: citizens who have, and seize, the opportunity to learn and relearn throughout their lives. We need citizens who are ready and able to take their knowledge of the best that has been thought and said and done and apply it to the problems of the present and the future. Read more...

By Marian Scott. Requiring new nurses to have a bachelor’s degree as of 2014 could aggravate understaffing in the already overburdened health-care system, the Quebec nurses’ federation warned Sunday.
“It risks creating panic in the health-care system,” Régine Laurent, president of the Fédération interprofessionnelle de la santé du Québec (FIQ), said in an interview after a press conference at federation headquarters.
She asked that the government hold off on its plan to require all new nurses to have a university degree for a few more years, because the conditions needed to make the new system work still aren’t in place. Read more...

By Jamaal Abdul-Alim. U.S. graduate schools are getting more applications from students in India and Brazil, but fewer from students in China. Those shifts are among the various changes in the portions of applications being sent to U.S. graduate schools from students around the world, according to a new report being released today from the Council of Graduate Schools.
The report also shows that applications from prospective international students only increased 1 percent in 2013, the smallest increase in the past eight years and significantly lower than the 9- and 11-percent increases that took place in 2012 and 2011, respectively.
The biggest factor in the overall decline in the number of grad school applications from abroad was driven mostly by a decline in applications from China, according to the report, which is Phase I of the 2013 CGS International Graduate Admissions Survey. Phases II and III will deal with admissions and enrollment, respectively. Read more...