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.”