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By Lloyd Axworthy. Because we live in a knowledge-based economy, the need for a well-educated and flexible generation of employees, entrepreneurs, community builders and leaders is critically important to the future health of Manitoba. The data is conclusive: a university degree is the surest path to prosperity. Jobs for university graduates have grown twice as fast as those for college graduates since 2008. Governments are presently focused on closing the skills gap in Canada, but employers are saying they need more university graduates with critical thinking and transferable skills. This is not about universities or colleges: Canada needs to fund both to be effective. Yet precisely when we most need increased investment in post-secondary education, we see the opposite happening. Thirty years ago, Canada was a leader among Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development countries in university attainment rates. Now Canada ranks 15th of 34 countries. While others are growing and investing in their university system, in Canada government support has dropped nearly 50 per cent since 1978, when average support was more than $20,000 per student. By 2012, per student funding was $10,900. Read more...

The government and post-secondary institutions will work together on changes despite harsh words after the province slashed funding to universities, colleges and technical institutes.
Advanced Education Minister Thomas Lukaszuk met with 26 presidents of post-secondary institutions Thursday and says they all agree on moving forward.
The province wants more cooperation, less duplication and a bigger emphasis on research which can be used for commercial purposes.
U of A president Indira Samarasekera said the presidents will now meet on a regular basis. Read more...

By Jo VanEvery. I’ve been following the discussion about Big Labs (Nicola Koper) and Small Labs (David Smith) with interest. I suspect many humanities and social science folks have skipped it altogether, assuming that it doesn’t apply to them. I encourage you to read those posts anyway. They raise some important points.
Is it a zero sum game?
One of the key issues in both pieces is the amount of time and attention your supervisor can give your project and your career development. While Nicola Koper makes a good case for economies of scale in terms of equipment, field work, and conference travel, this may be less relevant to those in fields where equipment and field work are not so central, whether in the humanities or more theoretical scientific fields. Read more...

By Rosanna Tamburri. Publisher licences make it difficult for libraries to share books by interlibrary loan, hampering small universities most of all. Electronic books, for all of their convenience and versatility, are threatening to put an end to a longstanding and cherished tradition at academic libraries: interlibrary loans. As libraries try to grapple with the problem, some are experimenting with new ways to share electronic monographs. “With e-books we are in a whole different world,” said Brent Roe, executive director of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries. When purchasing a print version of a book, libraries own the copy and are free to lend it to whomever they wish. But electronic books are most often licensed to, rather than purchased by, libraries. Licensing agreements usually permit a specified number of multiple users to view an e-book at once, giving libraries more flexibility to lend books to their own students and faculty while alleviating some of the space crunch that libraries face. Read more...

By David Kent. Lack of data makes it difficult to craft good policy to meet postdocs’ needs, say organizers. In 2009, the newly created Canadian Association of Postdoctoral Scholars undertook its first survey of postdoctoral fellows, or PDFs. The results revealed that the average fellow in Canada was between 30 and 35 years of age, earned under $40,000 and had limited access to extended health coverage or other benefits.
This workplace snapshot was taken at a time of great unrest for PDFs, as the federal government had recently changed its taxation policy to make student scholarships – but not postdoctoral fellowships – tax-exempt. As a result, a substantial cohort of PhD graduates who continued in academic research as PDFs now earned less pay than they received during their graduate student years. In an effort to see if the situation has changed, CAPS has launched a new survey of PDFs and is encouraging all postdoctoral fellows in Canada to take part. Jeremy Mitchell, former chair of CAPS and leader of the current survey, said there is a pressing need for more complete and up-to-date data. Read more...

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...