October 17, 2006
Today from 10am til 8pm, 20 Ontario colleges are participating in the 6th annual Ontario College Information Fair at Exhibition Place in Toronto. Over 7,000 prospective students are expected to attend the event, which includes "interactive workshops" and "keynote forums." The theme this year is "Discovering an Education that Works." For more information, see
www.collegefair.ca.
CNW Media ReleaseMore than 800 high school students from across Ontario will travel to Hamilton on Thursday to test their mental agility, engineering skill and scientific know-how at the annual McMaster Engineering and Science Olympics. Competitions will include "the infamous egg drop, Engineering Jeopardy, constructing a Canada arm from plastic straws, programming a robot, mathematics mental gymnastics, and a physics paper triathlon, to name a few." The top student teams in each event can win more than $20,000 in McMaster entrance awards.
McMaster storyThere are five types of key decision factors when applicants choose between universities: academic factors (like entrance averages and institutional reputation), financial factors (like scholarships and tuition), outcome factors (like placement rates and co-op programs), campus factors (like extracurriculars and residences), and nurturing factors (like class size and perceived safety). The new
University Applicant Survey measures these 36 factors for subscribing institutions, and also graphs "push/pull" comparisons against each key competitor.
UAS DetailsYork University's Schulich School of Business has come in 30th worldwide, and first in Canada, in
The Economist's rankings for the fifth consecutive year.
Globe & MailThe University of Guelph ranked seventh among universities worldwide for its impact on agricultural sciences during the past decade, a study by
Science Watch reveals. U of G was the only Canadian university among the top 25 institutions ranked for agricultural research citations from 1996 to 2006. "The agricultural science research published by Guelph personnel is registering strongly in terms of its influence and significance as viewed by other scientists."
Guelph Media ReleaseThis month's
Men's Fitness magazine contains its annual list of the 25 fittest US colleges, based on student surveys about diet and exercise, availability of healthy food, and the quality of fitness facilities on campus. Dickinson College, in Pennsylvania, was rated "most fit," for mandatory physical education programs, among other things. Carnegie Mellon University, which was put on "academic probation," has plans for major investments in athletic facilities.
Carnegie Mellon Campus Paper ArticleA US study of graduation and completion rates at community colleges found that institutions with higher percentages of full-time faculty members have higher completion rates for their students. The study, by a uWashington professor of labour studies, will be published in a forthcoming issue of the
Journal of Higher Education. The use of adjunct professors is growing at two-year institutions, and while they are no less intelligent or effective in the classroom, they are less accessible outside lecture hours. "There is a fiction that you can cut costs with lots of adjuncts," but "low program completion rates are expensive."
Inside Higher EdThanks to streamlined visa processes, there has been an 18% increase in Chinese students studying in Britain, now totalling 60,000. New Zealand is also a popular destination, with 30,000 international students from China. The number of applicants wishing to study in the US has also tripled, thanks to relaxed visa regulations. Chinese students studying in Italy have increased tenfold this year, and South Korea has seen a 25% increase.
China NewsThe
New York Times reports that, although India graduates 400,000 engineers a year, a new study has found only one in four is actually employable; the remainder have either deficient technical skills, English-language abilities, or soft skills. The established Indian universities have tougher admission requirements than the US Ivy Leagues, and new private colleges produce grads of "uneven quality." The number of technology jobs in India is on track to double to 1.7 million over the next four years, and the labour shortage is driving up salaries rapidly. Nearly 40% of Indians remain illiterate.
New York Times article (With thanks to Teo Salgado, The University of Western Ontario)
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