Category: Policy Debate
Have you ever played a game of Snakes and Ladders with friends or family? At the end of the game, were you frustrated by the sheer amount of time you were forced to spend playing to arrive at an outcome? Humour me for a minute and picture yourself as a pawn in a game of admission and credit transfer Snakes and Ladders where the goal at the top of the board is recognition for your previously completed postsecondary education. (more…)
By Creso Sá
On July 13, Canada’s health scientists followed attentively a meeting of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research in Ottawa. The CIHR Summit brought together about 50 researchers and agency staff to debate a way out of the CIHR’s peer-review reform debacle. That the meeting happened in the first place represented a victory for the research community, as did its outcome. (more…)
By Gavin Moodie
In 1935 the President of the UK Board of Education averred:
It has, I believe, been an old complaint among many concerned with the technical side of education that that part of education has been the Cinderella. Well, the Government is determined that even if there was any truth in that in the past, there shall be none in the future.
By Gavin Moodie
The recent report of the Premier of Ontario’s Highly Skilled Workforce Expert Panel contains several proposals for ‘Building the workforce of tomorrow’ as the panel calls its report. One proposal is for ‘modernized’ apprenticeships. This is all of the panel’s description of its proposal: (more…)
By Creso Sá
On June 30 the Conference Board of Canada’s Centre for Skills and Post-Secondary Education released the report High Inequality, Higher Education – Merit, Access, and Equal Opportunity in Brazil. The goal of the report is to highlight policy efforts to address social inequality through higher education. Regrettably, the report contains serious factual errors and achieves no useful purpose. Its mischaracterizations are actually a disservice to higher education policy debate in Canada. (more…)
Like millions of people around the world, when I woke up on June 24th and saw that the “Leave” vote in the UK’s EU Referendum was over the 50% threshold, I was shell-shocked. But then I couldn’t help but wonder if the results might have been different if more people in the UK had studied abroad. (more…)
By Gavin Moodie
The report of the Premier of Ontario’s Highly Skilled Workforce Expert Panel released on June 23 is a useful advance on the ‘skills gap’ commentary common in much discussion of the relation between education and work in Canada and elsewhere. (more…)
By Creso Sá
When federal government released the budget earlier this year, it announced a review of “Federal Support for Fundamental Science.” A panel has been assembled to lead consultations through the Fall, and provide recommendations by the end of the year. What will this review encompass? How far is it likely to go? (more…)
Bureaucracy is an old enemy of Latin American science. The difficulty of importing research material — cell culture for example — and the maze of red tape that researchers must address are real obstacles. They can make research unviable and have slowed the progress of science in the region. (more…)
Universities in the UK have long learned to live with what the late, great British professor of higher education and ideas David Watson called in 2012 “flux and contingency”, “national policy confusion” and the “pressures of a hyper-active political context”. All of these features of the British context have become even more salient with the release of “Success as a knowledge economy”, the British government’s May 2016 white paper on higher education. (more…)