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Author: Alex Usher

Quality over Quantity

Yesterday, in talking about the global decline in post-secondary non-tertiary enrolments, I made the point that rising dependency ratios mean tighter labour markets, which in turn makes higher education more expensive due to higher foregone earnings. This, I noted, would put pressure on higher education to reduce the length of programs. The push for shorter programs will come both from individual learners and from employers and government.  For learners, it is because high wages mean high opportunity costs.  From a

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October 13, 2022 1 Comment

The Global Collapse in “College” Enrolments

One thing that’s been quite clear for awhile is that the Canadian community college sector has been seeing a decline in domestic enrolments for the better part of a decade.  Peak domestic community college enrolment was in 2012-13: by 2020-21 numbers were already down by over 10% and my understanding from chatting with people across the country is that domestic numbers have continued to decline in the past two years, quite substantially in some cases.  Obviously, many colleges have found

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October 12, 2022 8 Comments

Health Spending

Y’all are used to me playing around with financial data in the post-secondary sector.  Today, I want to play around a bit with data on cost escalation in the health sector, just so you all can see what the heck the post-secondary sector is up against when it comes to budget discussions in provincial cabinets. Let’s start with Figure 1, which shows provincial spending on health and post-secondary education since 2002.  Turns out that in the 2000s, post-secondary education was

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October 11, 2022 No Comments

University Governance in Canada

If you’ve been in any senior university administrator’s offices in the last few weeks, there’s a good chance you’ll have seen a paperback with vaguely constructivist art cover entitled University Governance in Canada: Navigating Complexity by the scholarly quartet of Julia Eastman, Glen Jones, Claude Trottier and Olivier Bégin-Caouette.  Within administrative circles, it’s getting a lot of buzz and praise for being an accurate portrait of the state of Canadian higher education in the early 2020s.  On balance, I think

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October 6, 2022 No Comments

Education at a Glance 2022

It’s that day of the year, when OECD releases its annual report on education across the world’s richest countries, known as Education at a Glance.  I have written about these releases many times before, and in truth a lot of the data tells the same story, year after year: Canada has very high attainment rates, mainly due to the way we choose to present our data on college students.  We also spend more than most countries on post-secondary education if

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October 5, 2022 No Comments

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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