Formation Continue du Supérieur

By Alex Usher. Just a quick note: next week, I’ll be on that all-too-common common transportation route, Toronto-Milwaukee-Shanghai, en route to attend (and deliver a paper at) the 6th International Conference on World-Class Universities, and the blog will be on hiatus while I’m away. Anyways, to business.
Everyone knows that for dependent students – that is, students less than four years out of secondary school, or who have not spent two consecutive years in the labour market full-time – the amount of student assistance available depends on parental income.  And that’s mostly true.  But there are some catches. More...

By Alex Usher. A few months back, I finished reading The Global Future of Higher Education and the Academic Profession: The BRICs and the United States (edited by – among others – Phil Altbach and Liz Reisberg). It’s a good book for two reasons: first, it contains pretty good thumbnail sketches of the four BRIC countries’ higher ed systems, and second, it shows how crazy and fragile academics lives are in most of the world. More...

By Alex Usher. The University of Toronto has a problem (several, actually, but I’m trying to keep these short).  And the problem is that if you’re not actually at U of T, and someone says “U of T”, what do you think of?  The answer, of course, is the St. George campus: that big and occasionally beautiful hunk of land East of Queen’s Park, College, and Bloor.
But what about the other two campuses?
It’s easy to forget about the Scarborough and Mississauga campuses. More...

By Alex Usher. Back in July, the Canadian Association of University Business Officers released the results of its survey of university finances for 2013-14.  The results underline the fact that institutions in Canada are facing some highly heterogeneous financial circumstances. More...

By Alex Usher. One of the most famous studies on higher education and opportunity was published a little over fifteen years ago by economists Alan Krueger and Stacy Berg Dale.  Using something called the College and Beyond Survey, they followed over 6,000 students who had been accepted to American universities in 1976, and then looked at their outcomes almost twenty years later, in 1995.  The key finding was that holding SATs constant, school selectivity didn’t matter much.  The important thing wasn’t attending Harvard, it was having the marks to get into Harvard (for whites, at least – for black students, accessing the networks available to selective school alumni did have a positive effect on education). More...

By Alex Usher. Ever since von Humboldt sold the Prussian Government on the idea that research universities were a tool with which to increase national power, they’ve been publicly funded to pursue precisely those ends.  The definition of “national power”, and the role universities are asked to play in developing it, has of course varied over time and by region.  Nowadays, we talk of power in terms of “national competitiveness”, and universities are supposed to play a role in ensuring that. More...

By Alex Usher. If what you are looking for is agricultural statistics, Statistics Canada is a wondrous place.  See, Statscan even made a fabulous (if oddly truncated) little video about agricultural statistics. More...

By Alex Usher. Take the following two thoughts/statements:

1.       “At our institution, research and teaching are inseparable, two sides of the same coin”
2.       “At our institution, if you are a good researcher, you get more money and you get teaching leave to do more research”

Both these statements can’t be true. More...