By . Tomorrow a new MOOC on leadership can be followed on the Canvas.Net platform. The Leadership for Real MOOC is of interest to me as it envisioned by Bert De Coutere at the Center for Creative Leadership and we had some great meetings figuring out what could be in, where possible foci might be. The CCL has been in the top 10 of the Financial Time rankings for executive education for 12 years in a row, so they are strong in what they do. More...
By David Kent. For the past year, I have been sitting on the publications committee for a society-run journal and in the journal’s quest to improve its impact factor (IF), it became clear to me that one of the system’s dark secrets is the “window of IF eligibility.” It single-handedly disadvantages journals whose science stands the test of time and favours journals that have speedy public relations’ campaigns.
For those not aware of it, a journal’s IF is based on two numbers for year X:
The IF is simply the first number divided by the second. More...
By Melonie Fullick. In this week’s post I’m going to stay with the subject of media and higher education, since there’s so much to work with at the moment – ‘tis the season, as they say. Since I last wrote, there’s a new, strategically-timed CIBC World Markets report that has garnered a good deal of media coverage, because it essentially claims that the value of university degrees has declined and that there are radically different “earnings premiums” on different fields of study. The humanities and social sciences of course end up lower in this hierarchy of profit than engineering, commerce, and health-related fields. There are a lot of points that have already been made in other columns and blogs, so I won’t repeat them (Léo Charbonneau has a selection linked in his own helpful post, here). Instead I’ll just take a some time to focus on one of the issues that I had with this report, or at least with the coverage of its contents. Read more...
By Jennifer Polk - From PhD to Life. I’ve just finished hosting my first group coaching call and I’m feeling pretty darn good about it. That’s how I feel about my life these days in general: pretty darn good. A year ago—less, even—I was jokingly telling friends and acquaintances that I was a loser with a PhD. I was only half joking.
How did I get here?
When I finished my PhD in history in February 2012, I knew where I was headed. I was already doing occasional freelance jobs as a researcher and administrative assistant, and liked the project-based work and flexibility of being self-employed. My plan was to carry on, adding more clients and taking on more challenging assignments. But things didn’t work out that way, and by the time I graduated in June, I wasn’t feeling so great about where I was at. Come the fall, I’d realized that Things Needed To Change. I quit one uninspiring part-time gig and started getting serious about my career search. More...
By Liz Koblyk. Talking about career chaos usually doesn’t win you any points with people in the midst of career exploration. But thinking about how to make use of chaos is a smart idea.
You don’t need a robust, scholarly understanding of chaos theory in order to have a useful framework for thinking about careers. You just need the understanding that large events can have large impacts on your career – but so can small events. Those small events have the ability to shape your career and move it in new, unpredicted directions. More...
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...
Fine and applied arts graduates are earning 12 per cent less than high school graduates once their education costs are factored in, a new survey has found.
Fine and applied arts graduates are earning 12 per cent less than high school graduates once their education costs are factored in, a new survey has found. The study by CIBC World Markets economists also notes the cost of a bachelor's degree is 20 per cent higher than it was in the late 2000s - but the unemployment rate among university graduates is now only 1.7 percentage points lower than high school graduates. 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...
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