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Author: Alex Usher

The Decline of American Higher Education

As recently as five years ago, Americans were generally pretty proud of their higher education system.  Sure, there were complaints, but even when the criticisms were more systemic, they were usually prefaced by the words “we’ve got the best system in the world, but…” It occurred to me the other day that I hadn’t heard that phrase in a while, and not just because COVID has reduced the frequency of my jaunts to DC, where I most often heard it. 

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September 15, 2022 No Comments

Saskatchewan in a Nutshell

We have almost come to the end of the nutshell series.  In this, the final installment, we will look at Saskatchewan, which when you think of it is kind of to the other provinces what Canada is to the rest of the world.  The quintessence of Canada, if you will. Taking Saskatchewan last is partly a function of data problems in the province.  As in several other provinces, college numbers are subject to a sudden surge in the late aughts,

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September 14, 2022 2 Comments

Relative Effort

People often want to compare jurisdictional efforts with respect to postsecondary education investments.   These are typically exercises in choosing denominators: the numerator (total spending) is constant, it’s just a question of how to normalize raw expenditures.  In Canada, we tend to normalize expenditures in one of two ways: either in per student terms, or in terms of gross domestic product.  Figures 1 and 2 show these two measures across Canada.  In short, Newfoundland and Labrador and Saskatchewan look the best

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September 13, 2022 1 Comment

Ontario Colleges (Yes, Again)

If you want a peek into how I spent my days, come, join with me on a quest to try to get Canadian institutional data in less than 3 years.  It’ll be fun, I promise.  It’s about Ontario Colleges, which are never not interesting. Let me show you two graphs which take us right up to the point where our national statistics agency’s data leaves off, 2019-20 (yes, really).  The first is international students as a percentage of Ontario’s total

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September 12, 2022 2 Comments

The Long Strange History of Loan Remission Policies

One thing that long marked Canada out as an oddball amongst nations in higher education policy is the reliance of its student aid systems on something called “loan remission”.  A series of recent policy moves has nearly eradicated the use of this policy tool. Loan remission is pretty simple.  Students take out a loan at the start of a year of studies and then before repayment begins some of it gets written off.  Sometimes it’s done annually, sometimes it’s done

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September 8, 2022 1 Comment

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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