On Education

Welcome to Yukon College

The Tyee has published my article Want Cheap Tuition? Try Yukon College. But it's not just about low-cost education. It's about a school that's pushing its own envelope.

Welcome to WikiEducator

If you're in teaching, and you want to find new ways to exploit the online medium, here's a site to explore: WikiEducator. It's well designed, clearly written, and free.

Nearly every young Chinese immigrant in Canada has post-secondary education: study

Via the Vancouver Sun, a report from the Ottawa Citizen: Nearly every young Chinese immigrant in Canada has post-secondary education: study. Excerpt:

Call it the China effect. 

An astonishing 88.3 per cent of young Chinese immigrants in Canada go to university — more than double the figure for young Canadians as a whole, according to a new study. 

When community college was added to the mix, 98.3 per cent of young Chinese immigrants sought post-secondary education by the time they were 21 years old. 

Ross Finnie, an economist at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa, expected the figure to be high. But this was astounding, he said. 

“These numbers are so high, they don’t even seem possible,” said Finnie, who crunched the numbers from Canada’s sweeping Youth in Transition Survey with co-author Richard Mueller at the University of Lethbridge. 

Arthur Sweetman, an economist at Queen’s University who has done extensive research on immigrant education and labour force participation, calls them “Generation 1.5” — immigrants who came to Canada as children and spend at least some years in the Canadian school system. 

Generation 1.5 has been thriving in Canada, despite figures that have suggested for the past 20 years that their parents have suffered in the quest for prosperity, said Sweetman. 

“Many immigrants come here for the kids. The kids understand that and they work for it.”

A disaster at UC Berkeley

A good but discouraging column by Bob Herbert of the New York Times: Cracks in the Future. Excerpt:

More of Berkeley’s undergraduates go on to get Ph.D.’s than those at any other university in the country. The school is among the nation’s leaders in producing winners of the Nobel Prize. An extraordinary amount of cutting-edge research in a wide variety of critically important fields, including energy and the biological sciences, is taking place here. 

While I was roaming the campus, talking to students, professors and administrators, word came that scientists had put together a full analysis and a fairly complete fossilized skeleton of Ardi, who is known to her closest living associates as Ardipithecus ramidus. At 4.4 million years of age, this four-foot tall, tree-climbing wonder is now the oldest known human ancestor. 

Give Berkeley credit. The school’s Tim White, a paleoanthropologist, led the international team that worked for years on this project, an invaluable advance in human knowledge and understanding. 

So it’s dismaying to realize that the grandeur of Berkeley (and the remarkable success of the University of California system, of which Berkeley is the flagship) is being jeopardized by shortsighted politicians and California’s colossally dysfunctional budget processes. 

Berkeley is caught in a full-blown budget crisis with nothing much in the way of upside in sight. The school is trying to cope with what the chancellor, Robert Birgeneau, described as a “severe and rapid loss in funding” from the state, which has shortchanged Berkeley’s budget nearly $150 million this year, and cut more than $800 million from the higher education system as a whole. 

This is like waving goodbye to the futures of untold numbers of students. Chancellor Birgeneau denounced the state’s action as “a completely irresponsible disinvestment in the future of its public universities.” 

(The chancellor was being kind. Anyone who has spent more than 10 minutes watching the chaos of California politicians trying to deal with fiscal and budgetary matters would consider “completely irresponsible” to be the mildest of possible characterizations.) 

Berkeley is laying off staffers, reducing faculty through attrition and cutting pay. Student fees will no doubt have to be raised, and the fear is that if the financial crisis continues unabated it will be difficult to retain and recruit the world-class scholars who do so much to make the school so special. 

Chancellor Birgeneau said he is optimistic that Berkeley will be able to maintain its greatness and continue to thrive, but he told me candidly in an interview, “It’s hard to see when we are going to get back to a situation where we can start rewarding people properly.”

BC schools face structural shortfall

The Tyee has published my article BC's Education Budget Faces 'Structural Shortfall'. It covers the concerns of our trustees, superintendents, and principals on the eve of our provincial election.

Could this happen to BC colleges?

Via the LA Times: California's community colleges near the breaking point. Excerpt:

Facing yawning budget gaps, California's public universities are shifting thousands of applicants into a community college system already swamped by newly unemployed adults and students priced out of other schools. 

By holding down enrollment, the shift would help balance budgets at UC and CSU campuses. 

But officials say the move seems likely to worsen problems at the state's 110 two-year campuses, many of which already face budget shortfalls that have them chopping courses, laying off part-time faculty and cramming classrooms so full that students have to perch on windowsills. 

"We hope to serve as many students as we can get in, but we're near the breaking point," said Jack Scott, statewide chancellor of the California community college system. 

In particular, many educators fear that an influx of new students will further reduce the ability of many community colleges to prepare students for transfer to four-year schools. The more savvy newcomers may shove aside some of the existing 2.5 million community college students, who are struggling to work toward a university degree from the bargain-priced, but strained, two-year system, officials say. 

The concerns are the more pressing because two-thirds of the state's college students, and most of the African Americans and Latinos, are at the two-year campuses. 

Even before absorbing displaced university students, California's community colleges are projected to grow at least 4% this year, according to the state Legislative Analyst's Office. A number of colleges say their enrollment may rise by up to 10%. 

If students cannot get the classes they need to be eligible for transfer to a four-year college, they could become discouraged and drop out, educators worry. 

The San Diego Community College District, for instance, had almost 8,000 students on waiting lists for one or more classes before the current semester even began, said Lynn Neault, vice chancellor of student services.

Enrolments are booming in BC's colleges and new "teaching universities." We'll see if funding keeps up.

Notes for the Next 40 Years

Here's the PowerPoint slideshow of my May 7 talk:
Download the_next_40_years.ppt

And here's a longish essay, "Towards a University Culture," written in 2007, that provides some context for my comments:
Download university_culture.doc

You may also want to scroll down to read some articles I've published in The Tyee over the past year on the Campus 2020 report, the widespread use and abuse of laptops in the classroom, the importance of our international students, and student problems with debt burdens.

The New Online Omnivores

Last weekend I attended Northern Voice, a bloggers' conference in Vancouver. The Tyee has now published my comments on the event: The New Online Omnivores.

On International Education

The Tyee has published my new article on international education and its value to British Columbia. You can read it here.

More discouraging news about the guys

Via The Star in Toronto, statistical confirmation that Canadian guys are still behind the girls academically: Girls study harder than boys, says StatsCan. Excerpt:

Young men are far less likely to attend university than young women, and a new study attributes the gap to differences in academic performance and study habits at the age of 15, as well as parental expectations.

Statistics Canada says about a quarter (26 per cent) of 19-year-old men had attended university in 2003 while almost two in five (39 per cent) 19-year-old women had done so.

The study found that more than three-quarters (77 per cent) of the gap was related to differences in the characteristics of young men and women that were available in the study. Weaker academic performance among men accounted for almost half (45 per cent) of the gap – specifically, young men had lower overall school marks at age 15, and had poorer performance on a standardized reading test.

Another 11 per cent of the gap was related to the fact that boys spend less time on their homework than girls and about 9 per cent was associated with the lower educational expectations placed upon boys by their parents.

Other student characteristics played moderate roles, accounting for a further 12 per cent of the gap collectively. The study found that men and women have different characteristics at age 15. For example, only about a third (32 per cent) of young men reported overall marks of 80 per cent or higher while almost half (46 per cent) of young girls fell in the same category.

Young men also fared more poorly on a standardized reading test: only 20 per cent scored in the top quarter on the test, while 30 per cent of young women did so.

Young men and women are also quite different in terms of the amount of time they spend on homework: only 30 per cent of boys spent at least four hours a week on homework, compared with 41 per cent of girls.

The study also found that young men had lower expectations placed upon them: as many as 60 per cent had parents who expected them to complete a university degree, well behind the 70 per cent of young women in the same situation.