Despite an improving yet still soft job market for students, 70 per cent of Canadian post-secondary students say they have found summer jobs, according to the new BMO Student Summer Survey results released this week. That’s good news considering almost half of them will rely on summer earnings to pay for post-secondary education (48 per cent) or cover day-to-day school-year expenses (61 per cent).
Post-secondary students across Canada say government loans and grants (66 per cent), parental support (56 per cent) and summer job income (47 per cent) are the three top sources of funding for their post-secondary education. Despite drawing on multiple sources to fund these costs, 66 per cent expect to have some debt when they graduate.
However, according to the study, conducted by Leger Marketing, students are most likely to think they will have under $10,000 (32 per cent) in school debt or no debt at all (27 per cent), and 63 per cent think they'll be able to pay off their debt within five years.
Wednesday, 29 June, 2011
70% of students have summer jobs: BMO survey
Monday, 27 June, 2011
Reading ability and post-secondary participation
An article in the June edition of Statistics Canada's Education Matters uses Youth in Transition Survey (YITS) data to examine education, income, and labour market outcomes associated with proficiency levels in reading from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) at age 15.
The authors note that further study and analysis of the connection between age 15 reading proficiency and outcomes is needed, and their findings include the following:
The findings reported here indicate that many individuals at lower reading proficiency levels at age 15 make life-path choices that are substantively different from those at higher levels of reading proficiency. Youth with lower levels of proficiency were more likely to have ended their education with high school completion or less, while those who scored at or above Level 3 were more likely to have completed some form of postsecondary education. The decision to pursue a postsecondary education necessarily leads to a longer stay in the education system and at age 25, twice as many Level 4/5 youth were still in school relative to those below Level 3.The association between higher reading proficiency at age 15 and higher levels of educational attainment at age 25 is illustrated in the figure below:
Friday, 24 June, 2011
Weekend Music Blogging: Handsome Furs - Repatriated
This song, Repatriated, is the latest from Montreal-based outfit Handsome Furs’ third album Sound Kapital, the first HF album written entirely on keyboards. Serious post-punk sounds in this one.
Thursday, 23 June, 2011
Wednesday, 22 June, 2011
Sources of Canadian university revenue: Provincial comparisons
Statistics Canada and the Council of Ministers of Education Canada have published a new fact sheet which outlines spending on post-secondary education in Canada based on data from three different Statistics Canada surveys. Both national-level and provincial-level data are included.
The fact sheet includes summaries of household spending on tuition fees, average university tuition fees for undergraduate and graduate students, and a breakdown of university revenue sources. It notes that the provinces of Nova Scotia, Ontario, and New Brunswick receive the highest proportions of university funding from student fees -- about 30% for each province (see Figure below).
Download the full document here in .pdf format.
Tuesday, 21 June, 2011
Call for introduction of tuition fees in Finland
From University World News:
An economist has reopened the debate on whether to introduce tuition fees in Finland's universities by calling for a system similar to that in England.
In a report in Helsingin Sanomat, Finland's Finnish language daily, Matti Virén, professor of economics at Turku University, said university graduates should contribute to their own education rather than being subsidised from the taxes paid by those that did not go to university.
As with the British tuition fee system, itself is based on Australia's Higher Education Contribution Scheme introduced in 1989, student fees would initially be paid by the government. This 'loan' would then be repaid after graduation, once the ex-student's income had reached a certain threshold. The proposed Finnish scheme would see students pay up to an extra 6% in tax, depending on their income, until their study debt was paid off.
Monday, 20 June, 2011
Financial aid and student persistence in Columbia
An article in the current edition of the journal Higher Education examines the association between student financial aid and attrition of post-secondary students in Colombia. The abstract:
The main objective of this study is to estimate the association between financial aid and college dropout rates of postsecondary students in Colombia. We use a unique dataset from the Colombian Ministry of Education that includes all enrolled college students in the country between 1998 and 2008. Logistic regression is used to identify the correlation between receiving different forms of financial aid on the dropout rates of the students. The main results of the study suggest that the probability of dropping out decrease between 25 and 29% according to the type of financial aid received. There is also evidence that the financial aid is more effective in reducing dropout rates at the beginning of the student’s college careers. This result holds after controlling by type of postsecondary institution attended. These findings suggest that financial aid is an effective tool to reduce dropout rates, and therefore increase persistence and expand access in Colombia.Reference: Melguizo, T., Sanchez Torres, F., & Jaime, H. (2011). The association between financial aid availability and the college dropout rates in Colombia. Higher Education: The International Journal of Higher Education Research, 32(2), 231–247.
Saturday, 18 June, 2011
Weekend Music Blogging: Old Man Luedecke - At The Airport (Live)
If you enjoy this performance by Old Man Luedecke, come enjoy his music in person at the 34th Newfoundland and Labrador Folk Festival in St. John's this August!
Friday, 17 June, 2011
Social & cultural impact of universities in Atlantic Canada
New report from the Association of Atlantic Universities:
The Association of Atlantic Universities (AAU) has published a comprehensive research study which measures the extensive social and cultural contribution of universities in Atlantic Canada. Thriving Together: Universities and Community in Atlantic Canada - shows that hundreds of thousands of Atlantic Canadians take advantage of the rich range of programs and events offered by universities, not only on campuses, but in communities at home and abroad. The report concludes that:Download the full report here in .pdf format.
More than 500,000 people attended cultural events, such as live theatrical and musical performances, staged at Atlantic universities;
About 17,000 members of the region’s university community were involved in charitable undertakings;
Universities were involved in more than 800 charitable community service initiatives during the year;
The region’s three largest universities (Memorial, Dalhousie and the University of New Brunswick) each offered more than 500 programs across a wide variety of areas;
Canada’s East Coast universities delivered more than 800 recreational programs to people in the region;
More than 300 community services programs provided a range of benefits to people in the region, including legal and medical services.
Thursday, 16 June, 2011
The Port Huron Statement at 49
Forty-nine years ago this week, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) released the Port Huron Statement. The statement was written at a SDS meeting in Port Huron, Michigan, and led by working-class student activist, and later Congressman, Tom Hayden. The Port Huron Statement became the manifesto of disaffected and disillusioned 1960s youth. It was a key source of inspiration for the civil rights and anti-war organizing that was to come.
Almost a half-century after it was written, the Port Huron Statement is as relevant today as it was then. Here's why:
The reason The Port Huron Statement remains an important document is that it is a model political manifesto of the American left. It puts forth a simple but very powerful idea, democracy that enlists the active participation of its citizens in its institutions, and it uses this idea to analyze the social conditions of its time, to criticize, in view of those conditions, the political and economic institutions that produced them, and to propose remedies that would move the country toward being a more truly democratic republic. The American left, as far as I'm aware, has produced nothing like it since.For more on the Port Huron Statement, check out this Nation article by Tom Hayden and Dick Flacks.
Wednesday, 15 June, 2011
Lagging PhD output stymies Canadian innovation
According to the Conference Board of Canada’s latest How Canada Performs analysis, Canada's relatively low number of people with advanced qualifications — such as PhDs — may be contributing to our failing grade on innovation.
The Conference Board found a positive relationship between higher PhD graduation rates and a country’s patenting activity. Patents are a commonly used measure of innovation activity, tracking how knowledge is being transformed into invention. Countries that rank high on patents – such as Switzerland, Sweden and Germany – also have high PhD graduation rates. Canada ranked 14th out of 17 countries on patents by population and last on PhD graduates.In the video below, Michael Bloom, Vice-President of Organizational Effectiveness and Learning at the Conference Board, discusses Canada's record on advanced skills as compared to competitor nations. He notes that Canada is 6th in university graduates but second last in output of PhD graduates.
There is also a link between PhD graduates and business expenditures on research and development (BERD). Countries with high BERD — such as Finland, Switzerland and Sweden — also rank high on PhD graduates. In addition to having relatively few PhD graduates per year, Canada continues to be a laggard when it comes to BERD, ranking second to last.
Thursday, 9 June, 2011
Monday, 6 June, 2011
Population trends and post-secondary enrollment
Late last month, the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC) released a report on university enrollment trends in Canada.
The report points out that the number of Canadians aged 18-to-21 -- the population from which universities have traditionally drawn a large segment the undergraduate population -- will reach a peak this year and drop by about 10% before rebounding.
While cohorts of 18-to-21 year-olds are projected to rebound substantially in most provinces, Statistics Canada’s medium growth scenario does not project the same for Newfoundland and Labrador (see the blue line in the Figure below).
In the absence of a successful campaign to recruit students from outside of the province, Memorial University and College of the North Atlantic will evidently be challenged to maintain current enrollment levels in the years to come.
Course Note: Students in Education 6807, Economics and Finance of Post-Secondary Education, should review the section on The value of a university degree on pages 39-51.
The full report, Trends in Higher Education – Enrolment, may be downloaded here in .pdf format.
Saturday, 4 June, 2011
Student debt bankrupting a generation
From The National Post:
In 2006, Nereid Lake was a single mom with an undergraduate degree in French linguistics from Simon Fraser University and well on her way to a master’s degree in linguistics when Canada Student Loans informed her she had exceeded the lifetime lending limit of the federal program and would have to leave university — without her degree.
At the time, she had accumulated about $60,000 in student loans.
“Even though I had an armload of academic awards, I was forced to leave,” she says. “My aspiration was to work in the field of voice recognition cognitive science, getting computers to understand human language. Instead I had to take the first job I could, as a low-earning court clerk. Now I’m nearly 40 just barely making ends meet and still owe more than $50,000 in student debt. I naively thought student loans would be the great equalizer. Instead I’ve plunged into a student debt nightmare.”
Ms. Lake is not alone. Nearly two million Canadians have student loans. That debt is worth about $20-billion and includes federal and provincial government loans and personal debt in the form of credit cards, family loans and lines of credit all used to finance post-secondary education. And that number is only set to grow as student loans owed to the government of Canada alone increase by $1.2-million a day. At the same time, the amount of unrecoverable student loan debt now sits at $149.5-million.
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