Invest in yourself— it pays dividends

By the editors - Wednesday, November 2, 2011 at 12:50 PM - 0 Comments

Photograpy by Cole Garside

Let’s talk about investments. Stocks? A reliable pipeline stock like Enbridge Inc. is up only 2.5 per cent over the past year. Bonds? Canada Savings Bonds are paying 0.5 per cent in the first year. Real estate’s a roll of the dice, and some people are calling for a crash. I’m not even going to get into collateralized debt obligations since, like the leaders on Wall Street who navigated us into the 2008 financial toilet, I don’t understand how they work.

There is one sure bet, though, and no one understands it better than you and your parents. It’s an investment in your own education. That sounds corny, but listen to the numbers: the annual return on a university education in Canada is at least 10 per cent. That’s 9.9 for men, 12.1 for women. As the brilliant and frugal Ben Franklin (his raised eyebrows on the U.S. 100 dollar bill a steady rebuke to our spendthrift ways) said a few hundred years ago: “If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.” With this in mind, we suggest you think of Maclean’s 21st annual university rankings issue as a comprehensive guide to the important business of investing in yourself.

The connection between a university education and a satisfying and successful working life is not speculative. University graduates have the highest employment rate in Canada and are much more likely to find full-time jobs. A degree is an insurance policy against the vagaries of the global economy. In the 2008 recession, says Statistics Canada, degree holders were less likely to be laid off, and more likely to be hired back promptly if they were laid off.

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Follow your heart? Get real.

By Scott Feschuk - Monday, October 31, 2011 at 8:30 AM - 0 Comments

AP; Bloomberg/Getty Images; Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute

After Steve Jobs died, his famous 2005 speech to university graduates went viral all over again. Many find the address moving and inspiring. But in a magazine issue dedicated to students at the beginning of their adult lives, it’s worth asking: just how practical is the late Apple CEO’s advice?

Jobs began his speech by talking about his decision as a young man to quit college. Only after dropping out, he said, was he able to drop in on the classes he actually found interesting, such as instruction in calligraphy. (His knowledge of fancy lettering later paid off when Jobs was designing the typeface for the first Macintosh computer.) His point: you should always go with your gut, make bold decisions and “trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”

Surely we can all agree that giving up on formal education and, instead, learning how to draw pretty letters worked out well for Steve Jobs. Then again, Jobs was a genius and a once-in-a-generation creative talent, so I suspect that dropping out of school to study the banjo or grow the world’s largest pumpkin would also have done the trick.

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The business of notes

By Josh Dehaas - Thursday, July 28, 2011 at 4:50 PM - 1 Comment

Photograph by Andrew Tolson

It was two o’clock in the morning on the night before her physiology mid-term when Jennifer Hidy turned on her laptop and saw what she calls “the blue screen of death.” A virus had killed her hard drive, erasing all of the carefully curated lecture notes that she was planning to read in the wee hours of the morning before her nine o’clock exam. She had visions of failure. She considered calling a friend. Then she remembered hearing about a new website called Notesolution.

Hidy headed to the school library, entered her University of Toronto email address into the site and—much to her relief—found that someone else had uploaded notes for her physiology classes. She printed them off and studied. A mere seven hours after recoiling from the blue screen, she sat down and aced her exam.

That’s the type of user that Kevin Wu, Jack Tai and Jackey Li envisioned helping when the three University of Toronto commerce students (now graduates) founded Notesolution last fall, says Wu. Since launching at four universities last November, the site has grown to 10 schools and nearly 10,000 members.

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The best university lectures to go

By Peter Shawn Taylor - Thursday, July 21, 2011 at 11:05 AM - 3 Comments

Getty Images, iStock; Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute

You’ve grasped the intricacies of quantum mechanics, toured the great museums of Europe, understood the significance of the Peloponnesian War and come to terms with why evil exists. So what’s next? Perhaps wine appreciation, the mysteries of brain science or Hitler’s rise to power.

Welcome to The Great Courses, a company that’s been selling erudite audio and video lectures delivered by top-notch professors to well-heeled and inquisitive American customers for over 20 years. Now it’s planning a big Canadian presence too. Minds: prepared to be expanded.

The course selection at The Great Courses reads like an educational playground for the intellectually curious. It’s as broad and detailed as any university course calendar, although much more convenient. Courses typically consist of 12 to 36 half-hour lectures on CD, DVD or audio file. Packed with undergraduate-level information, each lecture is short enough to enjoy while commuting, after dinner, or while killing time during your kid’s dance lesson.

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Crazy U: One Dad's Crash Course In Getting His Kid Into College

By Peter Shawn Taylor - Thursday, April 14, 2011 at 7:49 AM - 0 Comments

If the purpose of art is to elicit an emotional response, then this is a book of intense artistry. The reaction from most Canadian parents who read it will be intense, hand-raising, thank-you-God relief they don’t have to participate in the madness that is the U.S. college application process.

Crazy U combines U.S. writer Andrew Ferguson’s first-person account of helping his son get into college with a behind-the-scenes investigation into the American university industry. It is a world of competition, conflict and confusions that can apparently only be solved by generous applications of cash.

Ferguson provides a brief history of the controversial SAT test, its opponents and the various prep courses that cling like remora to its underside. He visits with Kat Cohen, an independent college admission counsellor who charges $40,000 for her “platinum package” of advice on how to get into the school of your choice. As personal essays are now a major component of applications, and since these unfairly favour Type-A boasters, Ferguson finds a “model essay development service” that promises to turn every student into a mouthy extrovert. He spends $199 on an essay and finds “every sentence contained a little stink bomb of braggadocio.”

While fascinating in their own right, Ferguson’s experiences—thankfully—have limited applicability to Canada. Some Canadian schools do require personal essays. But aggressive competition for spots in top schools, driven by what Ferguson calls “that feral look of parental ambition,” is largely absent north of the border. For that we can thank the uniform quality of Canadian universities, a more civilized application process and our muted interest in the provenance of degrees.

Regardless of cross-border differences, however, Ferguson is a witty writer worth reading for his talent alone. Describing the university brochures sent to his son, he says they “were printed on paper so thick and voluptuous they might have been mistaken for the leaves of a rubber plant—you didn’t know whether to read them or slurp them like a giraffe.” There’s plenty to slurp here.

Policy alert

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, March 29, 2011 at 10:12 AM - 211 Comments

Michael Ignatieff promises student aid.

The Liberal leader’s proposed “learning passport” would provide tax-free grants of $4,000 — or $1,000 a year for four years — for students across Canada to attend college or university. Students from low-income families would qualify for as much as $6,500 over four years, or up to $1,500 a year. The money would be provided through existing registered education savings plans, or RESPs, but families would not be required to make contributions. The funds would be held until the student decides to go to school.

Now we don't have to worry'

By Josh Dehaas - Thursday, March 3, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Andrew Tolson

Jessica Holman almost didn’t apply to university. Once accepted, she almost didn’t go. Even after a successful first semester of social work at Carleton University, she often felt she should be working instead of studying. The thing constantly nagging at her? Money.

That’s why Holman started crying when a woman from Maclean’s told her that she’d won the $20,000 scholarship contest, which was part of our 20th Rankings Issue celebration. She was chosen at random from more than 27,000 entries. “Maclean’s didn’t know how badly my family needs the money, so it’s kind of astonishing that we were the ones who won,” says Holman. “Now we don’t have to worry about whether or not I can go back to school next year.”

When she says “we,” she means her entire family back in Oakville, Ont. Her mom, dad—even her older brother and sister—are all scrimping and saving to help her pay for school. Her experience is a good reminder of how much many Canadian families sacrifice to send their kids to university. All in, it now costs roughly $80,000 for a four-year undergraduate degree, according to TD Economics. For many families, it’s a struggle to put even one child through school.

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Do-it-yourselfism

By Kate Lunau - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 at 10:08 AM - 4 Comments

Photograph by Rick Collins

After graduating from the University of Western Ontario in 2004, long-time friends Joe Facciolo and Skai Dalziel, both from Barrie, Ont., set off to travel the world. By the time they came home, in 2008, the job market had toughened considerably. “I was looking for work in alternative energy, but nothing really materialized,” says Dalziel, 30. Chatting about their travels, and how hard it was to find a good restaurant in a new city, the two friends were seized by a business idea. “We said, we’re young and we don’t have a lot of responsibility,” Dalziel says. “We figured it was a good time to give it a go.”

That fall, they moved to Whistler, B.C., where they knew the tourism market was strong. By November, Whistler Tasting Tours—which provides guided tours that visit some of Whistler’s best restaurants, providing a multi-course dinner in one evening—was born. “One of the biggest challenges was securing ?nancing,” Dalziel says. “Banks weren’t interested in getting involved.” The Canadian Youth Business Foundation (CYBF), a charitable organization that works with entrepreneurs aged 18 to 34, gave them a $15,000 loan, and Whistler Tasting Tours was profitable within its first year; now they’re talking about branching out to other locations. Running a business, “you’re letting go of your social life,” he says. “But it’s really rewarding.”

Facciolo and Dalziel are two of countless twentysomethings who’ve avoided a more traditional career path, launching their own business instead of working for somebody else. Driven by a tight job market, the number of tools available online, and a growing sense of do-it-yourselfism, entrepreneurship is booming among students and recent grads. And with role models like Mark Zuckerberg, the 26-year-old billionaire founder of Facebook, they’re in good company.

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Get me a job—or give me my money back

By Kate Lunau - Monday, February 28, 2011 at 9:54 AM - 51 Comments

Photograph by Andrew Tolson

Carlie Deneiko is from the tiny town of Watrous, Sask. (population 1,800), more than an hour’s drive southeast of Saskatoon. As a teen, she dreamed of travelling the world, but her priorities are shifting. “I’ve got a boyfriend, and I’m really settled,” says Deneiko, 20, a student in the faculty of education at the University of Regina. “It’s becoming more important to me to get a job.”

Deneiko’s not too worried: her education comes with a job guarantee. She’s one of 355 students enrolled in a new program at the University of Regina that promises students they’ll land a job—in their chosen field—within six months of graduation. If they don’t, the university gives them another year of tuition for free. The UR Guarantee has other bells and whistles (like internships and work programs), but for Deneiko, it’s that extra year of free tuition that pulled her in. “If I don’t get a job, I’m coming back to get my special education certificate,” she says.

Since it launched in September, the UR Guarantee has been incredibly popular. Enrolment in the program, which is open to all first-year students, has already jumped by 24 per cent, says president Vianne Timmons. “We looked at students’ motivation for attending university,” she says, “and realized they’re looking at a degree primarily as a launching pad for a career.”

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The next generation

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, February 3, 2011 at 9:30 AM - 26 Comments

The Prime Minister’s Office presently includes at least three former members of the student council at the University of Western Ontario and the student newspaper at Western has groomed some of the finest writers in Ottawa (Wells, Feschuk, Delacourt), so not only because student politics are fascinating experiments in democracy is it worth following the Gazette’s exhaustive election blogging. To wit.

The current social science president is the front runner going into the campaign because of his largest faculty on campus base and the lack of another widely-known candidate. His platform will likely be fairly safe — think Mike Tithecott’s last year — which is good for him because it gives us media types less fodder to grill him on. It’s bad for constituents (that’s you!) because they may not see much innovation or challenging ideas put forth, but no one ever remembers the platform anyway, so outside council chambers and the Gazette office the point is moot. Forgione is personable, clean-cut and prepared — at this stage he’s easily the favourite.

Merit: the best and only way to decide who gets into university

By macleans.ca - Thursday, November 25, 2010 at 10:30 AM - 624 Comments

Photograph by Colin O'Connor

Maclean’s annual University Rankings issue is our most popular and most discussed magazine of the year. The 2010 edition, released two weeks ago, was no exception. Alongside our comprehensive rankings of Canadian schools, we also tackled the biggest issues facing today’s university students. There were stories dealing with school stress, problem roommates, difficult school choices and sex. And when students told us race is becoming a conversation on Canadian campuses, we took a closer look at that as well.

Our reporters Stephanie Findlay and Nicholas Köhler spoke to university students, professors and administrators about campus racial balance and its implications. The resulting story was titled: ”‘Too Asian?’: a term used in the U.S. to talk about racial imbalance at Ivy League schools is now being whispered on Canadian campuses—by everyone but the students themselves, who speak out loud and clear.”

The article has generated a great deal of response, a representative sample of which is included in this week’s Letters (page six). Some of the comments we have seen on the Internet and in other media have suggested that by publishing this article, Maclean’s views Canadian universities as “Too Asian,” or that we hold a negative view of Asian students.

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Just calm down . . .

By Julia Belluz - Thursday, November 18, 2010 at 11:40 AM - 0 Comments

PHOTOGRAPHY ANDREW TOLSON, SIMON HAYTER

Dr. Michael Van Ameringen, professor in psychiatry at McMaster University, shares his top four tips for coping with university-related anxiety:

HIT THE GYM: “It’s been proven repeatedly that physical activity helps people manage anxiety and elevate mood. Make sure you incorporate that as part of your week.”

MANAGE EXPECTATIONS: “It’s important to learn to have reasonable expectations of yourself when you go to a new place. You’re not going to figure out the way to learn and instantly get 90s in all classes.”

TAKE A BREAK: “There’s no doubt that people are more efficient when they work for fixed periods of time, followed by planned breaks.”

PHONE A FRIEND: “It’s important not to allow yourself to become isolated. Staying in touch with people by phone and visiting them regularly is key. So is getting involved with campus activities because they provide vehicles for meeting new people.”

In Conversation with Linda Frum (audio)

By Cathrin Bradbury - Wednesday, November 10, 2010 at 4:35 PM - 5 Comments

Photography by Yvonne Berg

In 1987, McGill student Linda Frum upset the establishment by writing the first honest guide to Canadian universities. Twenty-three years later, Frum is a Canadian Senator and a mother whose teenagers are about to pick  schools. She spoke to Maclean’s editor Cathrin Bradbury from her home about what’s changed on campus since 1987, what hasn’t, and what should. To read the entire interview, pick up a copy of Maclean’s 2010 University Rankings issue.

On why kids need to grow up:

On why teaching kids “how to learn” is the wrong approach:

On why students should pay attention to the aesthetics of potential campuses:

On why she no longer believes universities need “less money”:

On why she loves the idea of liberal arts foundations, but fears it’s a lost cause:

On what she thinks still holds true about Western and Queen’s:

On which schools are undervalued and the ignorance of Canadians about each other:

Don’t let first-year university get you down

By Julia McKinnell - Tuesday, September 7, 2010 at 9:46 AM - 0 Comments

Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute

Many kids arrive on campus only to find, “This is way harder than I thought,” writes Dr. David Leibow in a new advice book for first-year students called What to Do When College Is Not the Best Time of Your Life. Usually, it’s a case of thinking, “I’m having trouble keeping up with my work. I don’t feel really close to anyone. I can’t fall asleep, then I can’t get up.” You may be looking around, thinking, “Everyone else is having the time of their life,” writes Leibow, a psychiatrist with years of experience treating college kids at Columbia University’s student mental health centre.

First off, you’re not alone. “Many of your fellow students go to the student counselling service or to private psychiatrists; they just don’t tell you about it. Which is a shame. Because it’s hard not to feel abnormal when you don’t know what normal is. Of course, it would be helpful if people were more open about what they really felt and thought. But, since no one wants to appear weak or inadequate, it’s unlikely a wave of honesty will sweep your campus soon.”

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The decline of studying

By Stephanie Findlay - Sunday, September 5, 2010 at 12:20 PM - 0 Comments

Getty Images

In 2006, Philip Babcock, a labour economist at the University of California, was surfing online when he came across a survey on the time use of undergraduate students at his school that shocked him. He noticed students were reporting perplexingly low studying times. Comparing his own university experience to his teaching experience over the past five years, Babcock had a gut feeling students weren’t studying as much, but remembers thinking, “people are always criticizing the generation that comes after them. Maybe they’re working their tails off.” So he decided to test the hypothesis. In the resulting study, to be published in the Review of Economics and Statistics later this year, Babcock and his co-author, Mindy Marks, found that since 1961, the amount of time an average undergraduate student spends studying has declined by 42 per cent, from 24 hours a week to 14. That drop is found within every demographic subgroup, within every faculty and at every type of college in the United States.

The study didn’t look at Canada, but the trend is true across North America. In his upcoming book, Lowering Higher Education: The Rise of Corporate Universities and the Fall of Liberal Education, James Côté, a sociology professor at the University of Western Ontario, analyzed a data set taken from 12,000 students from the U.S. and Canada and found similar results. Study times have gone down and grades have gone up, with the Canadian university average climbing from C to a B+/A- over the past 30 years.

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Learning Islamic finance

By Julia Belluz - Thursday, July 22, 2010 at 12:40 PM - 0 Comments

MOSAB OMAR/REUTERS

Starting in September, students can enrol in Canada’s first university course in Islamic finance. Walid Hejazi, the professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management who is developing the three-day program to begin in January 2011, says it will cater to executives who “want to get an edge to differentiate themselves.” Participants will study sharia-compliant financial instruments (Islamic law prohibits usury), as well as the legal and tax implications of Islamic finance.

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Idea alert

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, July 15, 2010 at 1:50 PM - 0 Comments

Michael Ignatieff throws out a suggestion.

On the second day of his summer-long cross-country tour, Ignatieff told people at a town hall meeting in Kingston that international experience is not something that should be frowned upon. It’s a direct rebuttal to the Conservative party’s efforts to paint Ignatieff — who spent more than two decades living and working in Britain and the United States — as someone who’s just visiting Canada.

“I don’t want Canadians to think the only good Canadian is someone who’s never left these shores,” Ignatieff said. He envisions a program in which the federal government would provide subsidized placements with Canadian institutions or partners overseas to “internationalize” an entire generation of young people.

Are college towns havens for hate?

By Jane Switzer - Thursday, July 8, 2010 at 12:20 PM - 0 Comments

CP Images

For many, it may come as a shock to find out that Canada’s biggest hate-crime capitals are three Ontario university towns. Kingston, London and Guelph boast the country’s highest rates of police-reported hate crimes, according to Statistics Canada.

But Barbara Perry, a professor and associate dean of social sciences at the University of Ontario Technical Institute in Oshawa, Ont., isn’t that surprised. All three populations have traditionally been homogeneous—white, Christian and English-speaking. And, says Perry, “like many other communities, they’re experiencing a lot of fairly rapid demographic change. These sorts of relatively small cities are struggling to come to grips with these shifts.” Guelph and London tied for first at 8.2 hate crimes per 100,000 citizens in 2008. And Kingston followed with a rate of 7.7 per 100,000. (Among Canada’s 10 biggest cities, Vancouver and Hamilton ranked the highest with a rate of 6.3 per 100,000.)

The presence of post-secondary schools, says Perry, can be a double-edged sword. Although those in university and college towns are likely to be better educated, roughly six out of 10 people charged with hate crimes were between the ages of 12 to 22. “Perhaps the victims themselves are more aware of their rights,” says Perry, “but I also think more youth means more offending.”

Since hate-crimes, which can include crimes motivated by race, religion or sexual orientation, are generally underreported, some experts see a silver lining in a city’s higher rates. Perry says it may have something to do with a greater awareness among citizens. Or, she says, perhaps the police are better trained and more perpetrators are being brought to justice.

Why did I major in anthropology?

By Julia McKinnell - Thursday, April 15, 2010 at 10:50 AM - 1 Comment

Photo Illustration by Lauren Cattermole

My degree was a waste of time. How did I wind up back at my parents’ house? My mom’s on my case. I need a job. For the newly graduated, life coach Kenneth Jedding offers advice in his new book, Higher Education: On Life, Landing a Job, and Everything Else They Didn’t Teach You in College.

Moving back into your parents’ house isn’t as pathetic as you might think, he writes. “It gives you the chance to explore career possibilities with less financial pressure. If you can work it to your advantage it will go down in your history as a smart move.”

That’s if you can survive your parents driving you crazy. “If you’re feeling like you can’t do anything right, from putting the orange juice back in the right place to wearing the right shoes to sending out your resumé to enough of the right people—then the criticism is probably excessive.” Still, “keep the peace as much as you can,” he urges. “You’ll need to find someone else to vent to.” Even better, “put on your running shoes, go out and run a few miles, yell at the top of your lungs if necessary, and then with all that pent-up anger out of your system, keep thinking about what you’re going to do career-wise.”

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Who wants to be a millionaire?

By Rachel Mendleson - Thursday, February 11, 2010 at 1:00 PM - 5 Comments

Photograph by Roger Lemoyne

There’s nothing like the near collapse of Wall Street to turn students off a career in business. According to a recent survey of U.S. freshmen, the global economic downturn, brought on by the misdeeds of some of the nation’s most well-established financial institutions, may be causing many to consider other options. UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) found that the percentage of students who planned to major in business dropped from 16.8 in 2008 to 14.4 in 2009—the lowest level in 35 years.

Though the year-over-year decline isn’t staggering, “it is significant,” according to Linda DeAngelo, one of the report’s authors. There have been several recessions since the institute did its first survey more than 40 years ago, but “this is the first time we’ve seen this type of drop,” says DeAngelo. (Interest peaked in 1987—the year of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street—when more than a quarter of respondents were eyeing a business major.) Of all the areas of focus in the survey under the umbrella of business, the most significant drop was in general business administration—an indication, says DeAngelo, “that business is not looking generally as appealing as it once did.”

While comparable data isn’t available for Canada, there is some indication of a similar trend: by September 2009, the Ontario Universities’ Application Centre had received 9.8 per cent fewer applications to business programs from high school graduates than the same time the previous year. Though interest in the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario hasn’t waned, faculty director Darren Meister says students are now more conscious of keeping doors open. These days, he says, those who pursue business do so because it’s what they truly want, with the understanding that “business school is not a guarantee of riches.”

College days (II)

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, January 18, 2010 at 11:37 AM - 16 Comments

Michael Ignatieff’s tour stop at the University of British Columbia apparently got a bit shouty on Friday. You can read the accounts of Canwest and the Ubyssey or, if you prefer, you can see and hear for yourself.

University without high school

By Julia McKinnell - Thursday, October 15, 2009 at 1:20 PM - 61 Comments

“Choosing to leave [high] school is an entrepreneurial move, not a cop-out” is the message of a new book aimed at teens, College Without High School. The author, Blake Boles, the co-founder of Unschool Adventures, writes, “Life is not a pyramid with doctors, lawyers and professors on the top, McDonald’s cashiers at the bottom and school the only ladder between.”

What does a high-schooler “who slaves away at meaningless disconnected problem sets every night become in later life?” he asks. “She becomes an adult who slaves away at a job she doesn’t enjoy, for less money than she deserves, for a one-week vacation through which she would prefer to sleep.” Boles’s book offers teens step-by-step advice on how to drop out of high school to tag tree frogs in Costa Rica or teach basic computer skills in Tanzania. It also shows how to condense schoolwork to meet admission requirements for university later on. Continue…

Idea alert

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 at 11:31 AM - 9 Comments

Keith Martin suggests we send the professors to Africa.

His early ideas had focused on getting doctors to developing nations. But Martin, a physician who has been to Africa 26 times, realized medical help alone wasn’t enough: without essentials like clean water, a local doctor’s good work could be quickly undone. So he hit upon the idea of centres for international health and development in universities that could serve as talent pools for the developing world.

He says campuses have the array of talents so often in demand in Third World countries – medicine, nursing, engineering, veterinary sciences, law, business and education. His pitch isn’t aimed at students. Rather it’s targeted at the professors, perhaps those nearing retirement, who are the experts in their fields, have the skills to work unsupervised and at this point in their life, have the time to spend in a developing nation.

Mum’s fine, Dad’s an absolute mess

By Monique Polak - Thursday, September 3, 2009 at 3:00 PM - 2 Comments

It’s not just moms whose feathers droop when their offspring fly the nest. It’s dads, too. In fact, with more and more dads playing an important role in their children’s upbringing, many modern fathers take it hard when their children leave home. Some suffer even more than their wives do.

Serge Bouharevich is still adjusting to the fact that his children, Ali, 25, and Yuri, 21, have left the family home in Montreal. “It’s been easier for Annie,” Bouharevich said of his wife Anne Soden, a lawyer. “Her work is much more structured than mine. I was a quasi-house husband,” said Bouharevich, 56, a video producer who works mostly out of a home office. Continue…