Adventures in Canadian Post-Secondary Education: December 2009

Thursday, 31 December, 2009

Iran persecuting 'star students'

On Wednesday, progovernment militia attacked and beat students at a school in northeastern Iran. Since last Sunday's massive protests nationwide, dozens of university students have been arrested as part of an aggressive policy against what are known as Iran's "star students."

In most places, being a star means ranking top of the class, but in Iran it means your name appears on a list of students considered a threat by the intelligence ministry. It also means a partial or complete ban from education.

The term comes from the fact that some students have learned of their status by seeing stars printed next to their names on test results.

Wednesday, 30 December, 2009

Dissertations on His Dudeness

From The New York Times:

Where cult films go, academics will follow. New in bookstores, and already in its second printing, is “The Year’s Work in Lebowski Studies,” an essay collection edited by Edward P. Comentale and Aaron Jaffe (Indiana University Press, $24.95). The book is, like the Dude himself, a little rough around the edges. But it’s worth an end-of-the-year holiday pop-in. Ideally you’d read it with a White Russian — the Dude’s cocktail of choice — in hand.

More than a few of this book’s essay titles will make you groan and laugh out loud at the same time (“ ‘The Big Lebowski’ and Paul de Man: Historicizing Irony and Ironizing Historicism”). But just as often, the writing here is a bit like the film: amiable, laid-back and possessed of a wobbly Zen-acuity.

Tuesday, 29 December, 2009

Promise and possibilities of podcasting

University of Brighton professor Tara Brabazon writing at The Times Higher Education about technological developments that will continue to transform higher learning this coming decade:

Early academic use of iPods continued the decades-long practice of recording lectures for students who missed a session. Quickly, sonic media were put to better use than medication for poor attendance.

For underconfident and inexperienced students, podcasts are an opportunity to connect theory and practice, thinking and doing. The advantages are clear: podcasts are inexpensive to produce. They build community and add emotion to education. Even social-networking sites that originally prioritised the visual now feature vocal widgets and online voice-recording services.

Monday, 28 December, 2009

Dubai offshore university campuses struggling

New York Times story:

The collapse of Dubai’s overheated economy has left the outposts of Michigan State University and the Rochester Institute of Technology in the United Arab Emirates struggling to attract enough qualified students to survive.

Wednesday, 23 December, 2009

Tibb's Eve Mixed Thread

Today marks the final day of operations for the Canadian Policy Research Networks (CPRN) which, after 15 years of public policy research, is sadly closing its doors due to a lack of funding.
The ODENA research alliance in Québec aims to bring together Aboriginal peoples, scholars, students, policy-makers, and the general public to develop knowledge useful to urban Aboriginal communities in Québec.
We have not heard the last from the Sir Wilfred Grenfell College autonomy movement:
Now that the emperor clearly has no clothes in recognizing what is happening here on the west coast, perhaps it is time for the people out here to change their political socks. We could take all this laying down — or not.
Big suprise - British academics oppose the planned £500m budget cut for universities.

Tuesday, 22 December, 2009

£518m funding cut for British universities

From The Financial Times:

English universities will have £500m less to spend next year than this in a move that increases pressure on the government to lift the cap on tuition fees after the general election.

Lord Mandelson yesterday cut another £135m from next year’s settlement for the Higher Education Funding Council for England. It comes on top of reductions already announced, including a £180m cut, meant to be met through “efficiency savings”, that was announced in the Budget.

In all, higher education’s funding will be £518m lower next year, a reduction of almost 7 per cent on this year’s £7.8bn expenditure. This year’s spending has been artificially boosted by £250m of capital expenditure that was brought forward to combat the recession. But capital expenditure will fall from this year’s £938m to £404m.

Ontario career college fined $36,000

From The Toronto Star:

In a dramatic change of policy, the provincial regulator of private career colleges has levied its first fines – totalling $36,000 – on an unregistered college.

The Toronto School of Music on Bayview Ave. also has been ordered to stop advertising unapproved vocational programs and issue refunds to students who were enrolled in those programs.

The crackdown under the Private Career Colleges Act comes less than two months after the Ontario government increased fines and promised tougher policing of rogue career colleges in the province.

Monday, 21 December, 2009

Higher tuition is a tax on the middle class . . .

According to a recent Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Association (OCUFA) submission to the Ontario Post-secondary Education Secretariat:

It is often claimed that publicly subsidized tuition fees represents a net transfer from lower-income families to higher-income families. If true, this would be a perverse outcome given the principles of the progressive tax system that underpins public support for higher education. However, OCUFA research strongly suggests that this is not the case. More than 60 per cent of families with children “benefit from the transfer inherent in subsidizing tuition from general government revenues.” Increasing tuition would decrease this net transfer to the majority of Ontario families. Moreover, a strategy of increased tuition and higher student financial aid would move the barriers to post-secondary education well into the middle of the income distribution. Tuition is therefore a tax on the middle class, and as it increases, the progressive elements of the post-secondary finance structure are reduced.

The full report, Investing in Students, Ensuring Success: Recommendations for a meaningful successor to Reaching Higher, may be downloaded here in .pdf format.

Sunday, 20 December, 2009

German student protests continue

Students are continuing their education strike campaign against implementation of the Bologna reforms, introduction of tuition fees and insufficient financial support. Lecture halls have been occupied at 80 universities throughout the country. In some cases the student demands have been backed by university heads while in Bonn the City Council has demonstrated its sympathy with the campaigns.

Student protest is above all levelled at the implementation of the Bologna process.

Critics claim the new bachelor and master's programmes, now introduced in the majority of subjects, have resulted in courses being too rigid, excessive examination pressure, severe overcrowding of lecture halls and seminar rooms, and mobility across faculties being restricted rather than facilitated. They say old curricula have not undergone a thorough reform but have been randomly streamlined and squeezed into a six and eight-semester timeframe without giving the contents due consideration.

Complete story here at University World News.

Podcast on research and educational policymaking

The Center for Enrollment Research, Policy, and Practice at the University of Southern California has posted its final podcast for 2009.

Crossing the Great Divide: Enhancing Efforts to Conduct Research that Informs Educational Policy features Dr. Jeff Milem, past president of the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE) and Professor at The University of Arizona.

Milem discusses the need for and ways of encouraging higher education researchers and academics to focus on applied research that can inform the efforts of educational institutions and policymakers. Click here to listen (runs 26:27).

Friday, 18 December, 2009

Investing in Aboriginal education benefits everyone

Improving educational outcomes for Aboriginals in Canada is the most effective means to alleviate Aboriginal marginalization and poverty, argue the authors of two technical papers on the issue commissioned by Canadian Policy Research Networks (CPRN). Investing in Aboriginal education would also have a positive and long-lasting effect on the Canadian economy as a whole, the authors conclude.

Investing in Aboriginal Education in Canada: An Economic Perspective by economist and Executive Director, Andrew Sharpe, and senior economist, Jean-François Arsenault at the Centre for the Study of Living Standards (CSLS), examines the strong positive correlation between education, employment and earnings that is well established in social science research, and postulates various positive economic outcomes for the Canadian economy – regionally and nationally – if Aboriginal educational attainment was improved even marginally. Sharpe and Arsenault argue that Canada’s Aboriginal population could play a key role in mitigating the looming long-term labour shortage caused by Canada’s ageing population and low birthrate.

Download the full report here in .pdf format.

Thursday, 17 December, 2009

Gender, education & employment outcomes

Elsie Hambrook, Chairperson of the New Brunswick Advisory Council on the Status of Women, jumps into the ongoing discussion about the disproportionate number of women attending universities in Canada:

Historically, girls have done at least as well as boys in school, though they were not always encouraged to further their education. Girls now do well in all subjects, even high school mathematics. Women do well on campus too. For example, there are proportionately more female engineering students on deans' lists than their numbers would suggest.

Yet, 20 years after women became the majority on university campuses, women in Canada hold five per cent of top corporate jobs and account for six per cent of the highest earners. The gap between the average hourly earnings of men and women in the province is worsening. Five years after graduation, New Brunswick women with a first university degree earn about 91 cents for every dollar made by her male counterpart. A substantial part of the gap in earnings between these women and men is unexplained.

Wednesday, 16 December, 2009

Grenfell College changes announced

I doubt that this will be the last we will hear on the issue of autonomy for Sir Wilfred Grenfell College:

A number of initiatives announced by the Provincial Government today will increase the independence of Sir Wilfred Grenfell and facilitate its growth. These initiatives build on the strengths of Grenfell and appropriately recognize its role as a university institution and not a college.
. . .

To assist the growth and independence of Sir Wilfred Grenfell, the Provincial Government has formally requested that the Board of Regents:

Rename Sir Wilfred Grenfell College to Memorial University of Newfoundland-Corner Brook to enhance its unique identity within the university system;

Submit a separate budget to the Provincial Government through the Board of Regents to allow independent budget processes and priority setting; and

Position the principal of Grenfell on the senior executive committee, reporting directly to the president of Memorial University.

Trends in Canadian university graduations

According to a newly released analysis from Statistics Canada, the number of Canadian university graduates from rose 43% between 1992 and 2007. Here's a breakdown of the gender trends in university graduations across the provinces:

Tuesday, 15 December, 2009

Introducing Tenurometer!

For some young professors, any evaluative tool called the "Tenurometer" (i.e. tenure-o-meter) is sure to turn some heads.

Which is the point, says Filippo Menczer, associate professor of computer of informatics and computer science at Indiana University and co-creator of the Tenurometer, a cheekily named tool (still in beta phase) designed to measure scholars' impact on their fields by counting how much they have contributed to the literature and how frequently those articles have been cited.

Complete story at InsideHigherEd.

Monday, 14 December, 2009

Cleaners 'worth more to society' than bankers

Hospital cleaners are worth more to society than bankers, a study suggests.

The research, carried out by think tank the New Economics Foundation, says hospital cleaners create £10 of value for every £1 they are paid.

It claims bankers are a drain on the country because of the damage they caused to the global economy.

They reportedly destroy £7 of value for every £1 they earn.

More here from the BBC News.

Sunday, 13 December, 2009

8 arrested in attack on UC chancellor's home

BERKELEY -- Eight people were in custody Saturday after a crowd of angry protesters broke windows and threw burning torches at UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau's campus residence in protest of fee hikes and budget cuts, authorities said.

More here from The San Francisco Chronicle.

Friday, 11 December, 2009

26 students arrested in protest over fee increases

New York Times story:

SAN FRANCISCO — Twenty-six students were arrested at San Francisco State University before dawn on Thursday after some students barricaded themselves inside a building to protest budget cuts and tuition increases across the state’s public university system.

Thursday, 10 December, 2009

Visions of tax credits dancing in their heads?

The House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance released its federal budget recommendations yesterday. Léo Charbonneau at University Affairs has posted a summary of some of the relevant post-secondary education items in the committee report on his blog.

The report notes that those who provided feedback to the finance committee expressed concern that "government’s post-secondary education tax measures for students . . . accrue disproportionately to students from families with higher incomes". So, of course, the comittee recommended . . . wait for it . . . a new tax credit:

The federal government [should] create a refundable tax credit for new graduates. The proposed tax credit should be available to those who move to designated regions and engage in employment in their field of study.

At least one student group is not impressed.

UK looks to cut £600m from science, education

From the BBC News:

The UK government is looking to make savings of £600m in higher education, and science and research budgets.

The cuts, which will cover the period to 2013, were announced in Wednesday's Pre-Budget Report (PBR).
. . .

It said £600m would come "from higher education and science and research budgets from a combination of changes to student support within existing arrangements; efficiency savings and prioritisation across universities, science and research; some switching of modes of study in higher education; and reductions in budgets that do not support student participation."

Wednesday, 9 December, 2009

No fee hike for Irish students but grants cut 5%

Budget Day in the Republic:

Education funding has been cut by more than 5 per cent in the Budget - but there is no increase in the student registration fee.

Teachers and third-level staff will bear the brunt of the cuts , with pay for the average teacher down by 6 per cent.

An increase in the €1,500 student registration charge was expected after the Government abandoned plans to introduce student loans two months ago.

But the increase did not materialise after legal opinion suggested any move to use the student charge to subsidise overall costs could be illegal. The registration fee is designed to cover the costs of student services in college.

However, the Budget was not all good news for students as Minister for Education Batt O’Keeffe announced a 5 per cent cut in student maintenance grants.

Wednesday morning mixed thread

->-> The Canadian Council on Learning, along with leaders of national aboriginal organizations, held a press conference this morning to release a new report titled The State of Aboriginal Learning in Canada: A Holistic Approach to Measuring Success. View the report here in .pdf format.

->-> The controversy surrounding the appointment of Pfizer Canada executive Bernard Prigent to the governing board of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) shows no sign of abatement. While the Conservative government does not see any inherent conflict in having a senior drug company executive involved in the adjudication of applications for public health research funding, some of us do. As of this morning, almost 4,000 people have signed an on-line petition against the Prigent appointment.

->-> Statistics Canada has, sort of, released financial information (income and expenditures) on community colleges and public vocational schools in Canada for the 2007/2008 academic year. For some reason, Statistics Canada wants us to "order" the data, rather than making it easily and freely available on-line.

->-> B.C.-based private post-secondary training provider CIBT Education Group Inc. has announced that it is expanding into India. CIBT subsidiary Sprott-Shaw College was at one point affiliated with Quest University Canada.

Tuesday, 8 December, 2009

On the male campus minority

The bookends of the editorial in today's Globe and Mail:

Indira Samarasekera, the president of the University of Alberta, was right to show concern for the future education of Canada's young men, the subject of a front-page story by Elizabeth Church in yesterday's Globe.

The barbs that have been directed at Ms. Samarasekera are unwarranted and shortsighted. She warned that the country's universities are unwittingly building a "demographic bomb": for the first time, men are noticeably underrepresented at Canadian universities, accounting for only 42 per cent of their students despite making up half the nation's population.
. . .

Granted, Ms. Samarasekera's decision to highlight white men rather than men in general seems more political than policy-minded. But it was not unfair of her to note how easily extra supports for white students are stigmatized as helping the rich get richer - a generalization that does not stand up to examination.

Ms. Samarasekera's detractors have misread the context. Men have not managed to close the enrolment gap, or to draw their high school grades even with women's. And jobs that attract hordes of high-school-educated men, such as those in Alberta's oil fields and Canada's automotive industry, are dwindling.

Canada's leaders want to build a more innovative economy. Equal numbers of bright, educated women and men are needed to drive it.

Monday, 7 December, 2009

Students Over Banks campaign

The U.S. advocacy group Campus Progress is running a campaign in support of President Obama's planned overhaul of the American federal student loans system. The website for the Students Over Banks campaign has lots of information and interactivity, and well done videos like the one below:

Making the case for a graduate tax

Lawrence Lockhart counters the major arguments against a post-secondary graduate tax in this week's University World News:

Opponents of the graduate tax have raised objections. First, most high-earning graduates would probably have to pay more than they would have paid in tuition fees. This is true but this is precisely the point of the graduate tax proposal: to shift some of the balance of graduate contributions from lower to higher earners; it's a tax, not a fee.

Second, and related to this, it is thought by some people to be unfair to ask graduates to pay a special tax for the rest of their lives. But there is no reason why there should not be a time limit on payments, such as the 25-year limit for the repayment of tuition fees.

Third, universities understandably want the contributions of their own graduates to be ring-fenced and independent of government interference. A hard-pressed government, however, might be tempted to claw back some fee revenue by reducing its annual grants to universities, particularly if a shortfall in the predicted repayments of student debts was shifting the funding problem back onto the taxpayer.

Last but not least, it is assumed that universities would lose out because the proceeds of a graduate tax would be lower than the revenue from tuition fees. On the contrary, I predict that, for a few years after its introduction, while genuine graduate-level jobs are in short supply, a graduate tax of 2% on taxable income would yield more revenue than the repayment of tuition fees at 9% of incomes over £15,000.

Friday, 4 December, 2009

20 years after the École Polytechnique Massacre

The December 6 Vigil at Memorial University of Newfoundland’s St. John’s campus will take place on ~~Sunday, Dec. 6~~ Monday, Dec. 7 at 6:30 p.m. ~~at the Engineering Building, room EN-2006~~. Details of the location to be announced.

Report on Aboriginal student grants under fire

Since last year, the federal department of Indian and Northern Affairs Canada has been considering changes and/or alternatives to the Post-Secondary Student Support Program (PSSSP). The PSSSP, a $300+ million program, is the main source of non-repayable grant aid for Aboriginal and First Nations students.

A November report on the PSSSP prepared by the Educational Policy Institute came under fire yesterday from the First Nations Education Steering Committee. The report, titled The Post-Secondary Student Support Program: An Examination of Alternative Delivery Mechanisms, includes a discussion of research on access to post-secondary education amongst Canada's Aboriginal population and concludes with options for changes to the administration of the PSSSP.

The First Nations Education Steering Committee would no doubt disagree with some of the administrative arrangements proposed in the report, however, it appears from yesterday's press release that the main source of contention with the report is the absence of consultation with First Nations regarding proposed changes to the PSSSP.

Downloaded the report in question here in .pdf format.

Thursday, 3 December, 2009

Tenure-track position in Adult Education

My faculty is currently advertising a tenure-track position in the area of Adult Education (application deadline is February 12, 2010). Here's a snippet from the ad:

The successful candidate for this position should hold a PhD in Adult Education, proven teaching ability within the post-secondary education system or an adult education setting, and research experience in the area of adult education. Previous experience working with community college, vocational and technical instructors would be a definite asset.

In addition to research and service responsibilities, the person hired to this position will teach at the undergraduate and graduate levels in Memorial University of Newfoundland's Adult Education and Post-Secondary Studies programs.

The entire advertisement is available on-line here in .pdf format. Applicants may also be interested in the terms of the recently expired collective agreement between our faculty and Memorial University which is also available on-line.

Post-secondary education and peace building

In this interview, provided by the Global University Network for Innovation, Professor David Francis of the Department of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford, reflects on the role of higher education institutions in peace building and gives some examples of how institutions can contribute to post-conflict societies.

Wednesday, 2 December, 2009

Manitoba to provide 60% of tuition credit up front

From Academica's Top Ten:

In its throne speech on Monday, the Manitoba government announced that beginning this year, students who live and work in the province will qualify for a portion of the tuition fee income tax rebate while they are still in school. In 2007, Manitoba introduced a 60% tax rebate on tuition for post-secondary students who stay and work in the province after graduating.

Tax credits in general are a poor way to provide financial aid to those who need assistance paying for education. Moreover, students in Manitoba will still need earned income to claim these credits against, and student unemployment this past summer was at the highest level on record.

Tuesday, 1 December, 2009

Countries banking on PhDs for economic growth

From The New York Times:

As countries seek a route to economic recovery, many are looking to advanced education to give them a competitive edge in global research and development. Others, including the United States, are cutting back, a cost-saving strategy that some economists warn could have serious consequences down the road.

The commitment to expanded doctoral and postdoctoral education and research has been especially strong in Ireland, where the gravity of the economic collapse led the government to create a special “Innovation Taskforce” in June, mandated to help build “a smart, high-value, export-led economy,” home to “some of the world’s leading research-intensive multinationals.”
. . .

Canada is also trying to raise the relatively low number of Ph.D.’s that it produces compared with the United States and other developed industrial countries, said Herb O’Heron of the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada. Many provincial governments, including the government of Ontario, now offer funding to universities to help expand graduate student enrollment.

UNB student council votes to cut international student representative position

Someone please cue the banjo music:

The first of three sets of recommendations made by the UNB Student Union's Governance Review Committee was debated at council on Monday, November 30th. One particularly controversial recommendation of the committee was restructuring council, removing the voting position of the International Student Representative and creating what the Governance Review Committee's report refers to as, "a network of non-voting members of Council to be called liaisons," which would include an international liaison.

The change was recommended by the committee, allegedly to address the issue of what it called "over-representation" of international students on council. The change was supported by a majority of councillors. The only councillors who voted against the motion were Law Representative Dave Steele and Arts Representative Tom Cheney.

New Brunswick to extend freeze on tuition fees

The Province of New Brunswick, having shifted its provincial budget date a few months ahead, will unveil its spending plans for next year later today. Unless there is a surprise, which I suspect not, the province's key post-secondary planks have already been revealed. In addition to millions in planned spending for capital projects, the current tuition fee policy in New Brunswick will continue.

From The Canadian Press:

The government will announce that university tuitions will be frozen for another year — the third year in a row.

But Arseneault said that freeze won’t come at the expense of university budgets. “We funded that tuition freeze,” he said.

Extending the university tuition freeze next year will cost the government $6.1 million, he said.

He also noted that tuition at community colleges hasn’t increased in the last five years and “we are not raising tuition at the community college level this year.”