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One Thought to Start Your Day
One Thought To Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.
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Notes for the NDP Leadership Race
As contestants start to jump into the federal NDP leadership race, it’s only a matter of time before someone starts promising free tuition to all across the land. Now, I’m not going to rehash why free tuition is both regressive and undesirable (though if you really want to take a
Two Studies to Ponder
Sometimes, I read research reports which are fascinating but probably wouldn’t make for an entire blog post (or at least a good one) on their own. Here are two from the last couple of weeks. Research vs. Teaching Much of the rhetoric around universities’ superiority over other educational providers is
Canada’s Rankings Run-up
Canada did quite well out of a couple of university rankings which have come out in the last month or so: the Times Higher education’s “Most International Universities” ranking, and the QS “Best Student Cities” ranking. But there’s actually less to this success than meets the eye. Let me explain. Let’s start
Four Mega-trends in International Higher Education – Economics
If there’s one word everyone can agree upon when talking about international education, it’s “expensive”. Moving across borders to go to school isn’t cheap and so it’s no surprise that international education really got big certain after large developing countries (mainly but not exclusively China and India) started getting rich
How to Fund (3)
You all may remember that in early 2015, the province of Ontario announced it was going to review its university funding formula. There was no particular urgency to do so, and many were puzzled as to “why now”? The answer, we were told, was that the Liberal government thought it
How to Fund (2)
As I noted yesterday, in Canada we have some kind of phobia about output-based funding. In the 1990s, Ontario and Alberta introduced, and then later killed, key performance indicators with funding attached. Quebec used to pay some money out to institutions based on the number of degrees awarded, not just
How to Fund (1)
Over the next three days, I want to talk about funding formulas. I know I did this a couple of years ago, at the start of the Ontario funding formula review exercise (see here, here, and here, but it’s worth revisiting partly because I’m cheesed off at how Ontario managed to
When Should the Education System Say “No”?
There’s an argument going on in the UK right now about re-introducing grammar schools. Until the 1960s, grammar schools were a selective tier of the secondary system. Everyone took exams at the age of eleven, and the most academically able were selected to go to these schools, the purpose of
Four Megatrends in International Higher Education – Demographics
Last week I noted that one of the big factors in international education was the big increase in enrolments around the world, particularly in developing countries. Part of that big increase had to do with a significant increase in the number of youth around the world who were of “normal” age
Skills and Youth
What with the Advisory Council on Growth’s paper on skills, and the Expert Panel on Youth Employment wrapping up, public policy is suddenly back to a focus on skills – and in particular what skills youth should have. So, let’s talk about that. While some in the federal government will
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