Formation Continue du Supérieur

By David Kent. It seems that my last post created a bit of a stir and unfortunately I was away for a week and didn’t catch up to the comments right away. I think it’s important based on those comments to clarify a few things about my perspective on this before going into ways that we can manage the core issues.
First, I am not advocating for low postdoctoral salaries in Canada – far from it. I know there are many underpaid and undervalued highly educated people out there and the crisis is especially bad in the humanities (low to no funding) and life sciences (very lengthy doctoral and postdoctoral terms). The main point I was trying to make in the article was that we need to provide good sound reasoning why increases are needed and where the money should come from. I also would stress again that the idea of paying more grant dollars into salary will not be palatable without such a measured approach.
Second, I do not view academic research like a private-sector capitalist endeavour and find the comparison to coal mining unfair. To me, research is the stuff governments pay to get done for the public because the private sector won’t pay for it. Unfortunately, that gives academic researchers extraordinarily little bargaining power – if we stop doing academic research, few will notice the effect immediately. Moreover, coal miners worked in the 1800s because they had to in order to feed families. Despite the chronic undervaluing of postdoctoral fellows, these postdocs are not starving nor do they have “no other option” to make more money – they can (and do) leave. It doesn’t mean that academic researchers should be poorly paid, but it does again mean that the case for increases needs to be strongly argued and well justified. Read more...

MORE coursework and skills with wide application are among suggestions to update doctoral education.
"The traditional purpose of a PhD was to provide the training necessary to start on an academic career," says a new discussion paper, The changing PhD, from the Group of Eight universities.
"This is no longer the case and in some countries as few as five percent of PhD graduates find permanent academic positions.
"Another potential career pathway is as a researcher in industry.
"However, many PhD graduates find themselves in non-academic, non-research positions in which they will not use their disciplinary knowledge and skills directly. Read more...

By Melonie Fullick. A recent post by David Naylor, the President of the University of Toronto, has been quite popular with academics and has generated a lot of commentary. Naylor makes the argument that Canadian higher education is dogged by “zombie ideas”, and he describes two of them: the first is that universities “ought to produce more job-ready, skills-focused graduates [and] focus on preparing people for careers”. The second is the idea that research driven by short-term application or commercialization, should be prioritized by universities because it provides a better return on governments’ funding investments. I focus here on the first point, since in the past few weeks, in the run-up to the federal budget on March 21st, there has been a great deal of coverage of the alleged “skills gap” in in the Canadian workforce. Others have already done the work of summarising this issue, but as a quick recap, the argument goes something like this: business leaders and employers in Canada complain (to the government) that they cannot fill positions because candidates lack the skills. Read more...

By Léo Charbonneau. Prior to the unveiling of the federal budget last Thursday, there was lots of talk about a “skills mismatch” in Canada which had some within the university community concerned. That’s because at least some of the reporting contained blithe assertions like, “there are too many kids getting BAs and not enough welders,” or hoary clichés about “all those bartenders and baristas with expensive university degrees.”
In the end, the skills provisions in the 2013 budget likely will have little practical impact, positive or negative, on universities. The budget’s signature new Canada Jobs Grant program to help train or retrain Canadians for “labour market demands” is meant to be of short duration and is aimed at community colleges, career colleges and trade union training centres. There is some doubt about whether such a program will have the desired effect or is needed, but that’s a different matter. Read more...

By Mel Broitman. The Harper government boasts that foreign students brought $8-billion into the Canadian economy in 2010. When you consider what’s at stake, and the federal government’s goal to double the international student intake by 2022, it borders on the absurd to think that in promoting Canadian education abroad, the Canadian government is short of funds to serve a glass of water. Such is the way Canada frequently presents itself as an international student recruiter. This was on display recently when the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade held a major Canadian education promotion event in Lagos, Nigeria, in January. Read more...

By Lu Ann La Salle. The cost of a four-year university degree for a child born in 2013 could rise to more than $140,000 due to tuition inflation, a new study says. But three-quarters of parents with children under 18 haven’t made a detailed estimate of the total cost of post-secondary education, said BMO’s Wealth Institute in a report released on Wednesday. Tuition and other costs for a four-year university degree now can cost more than $60,000, the report said. Read more...

By Roger Moore. The draft letter of expectation that the provincial government recently sent to the University of Alberta is great cause for concern for those who value the benefits of research. Research is essentially an assembly line: at the forefront there are fundamental researchers extracting the raw knowledge about the nature of the universe. These knowledge breakthroughs are then refined and processed by applied researchers to create the technological breakthroughs that industry then takes and uses to create devices and processes that increase our standard of living. If this were the oil industry, applied research would be a refinery and basic research would be the prospectors and drillers who find, extract and feed the crude oil to the refinery. Nobody would ever suggest that we stop prospecting and drilling for oil and focus purely on refining, because once the existing reserves ran out, the refinery would shutdown. Read more...

By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA. Alumni of elite colleges are accustomed to getting requests for money from their alma mater, but the appeal that Harvard sent to thousands of graduates on Monday was something new: a plea to donate their time and intellects to the rapidly expanding field of online education. For the first time, Harvard has opened a humanities course, The Ancient Greek Hero, as a free online class. In an e-mail sent Monday, it asked alumni who had taken the course at the university to volunteer as online mentors and discussion group managers. Read more...