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Author: Alex Usher

The Alberta Exodus

A few months ago I wrote a piece on inter-provincial mobility in Canada in which I a) noted that in absolute terms, Alberta was the country’s largest net-exporter of students and b) this was a big change from 15 years ago when it was one of the larger net-importers.  When I pointed this out, I had a number of people on Twitter make assumptions about the deterioration of prospects for young Albertans, particularly after the collapse of the oil industry/arrival

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May 25, 2022 3 Comments

New Brunswick in a Nutshell

Morning everyone.  Today’s edition of the Nutshell series features one of the more anomalous provinces in Canada (from a higher education perspective, at least), the one whose beaches Le Monde once referred to as “Canada’s Riviera”: New Brunswick! New Brunswick’s anomalous status is mostly centered around the issue of enrolment: it is the only province in Confederation that has seen effectively no growth over the past two decades.  This is not to say that there have been no changes –

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May 24, 2022 1 Comment

The Fracturing of Global Rankings

Interesting news out of China last week, as three major research universities – Lanzhou University, Renmin University and Nanjing University (the last of which is a genuine global player)  announced that they would stop participating in annual rankings conducted by overseas rankings agencies.  The purported reason?  Because, apparently, they wanted to focus more on delivering “education with Chinese characteristics,” echoing a recent call from Xi Jinping to universities to avoid “copy(ing) foreign standards and models when we build world-class universities

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May 19, 2022 No Comments

Manitoba in a Nutshell

Good morning. We’ve done “nutshell” portraits of Nova Scotia, Alberta and British Columbia.   Now, on to the greatest province of them all, the only one that shot its way into Confederation, Manitoba. Let’s start with student numbers.  Manitoba has seen slow but steady growth on the university side, with numbers growing from 25,000 to 40,000 between 2001 and 2020  With colleges, it is hard to be exact about growth rates since a substantial portion of the increase shown here was in fact due to changing Statistics Canada

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May 18, 2022 No Comments

Northern Post-secondary Education

Though it passed mostly un-noticed south of 60, the Task Force on Northern Post-Secondary Education issued its final report at the end of March.  It’s worth taking a bit of time to examine and reflect on what it says. Most of the report is concerned with the documentation of barriers to the growth of higher education in the North, as recounted through public consultations and a literature review.  And these challenges are substantial: the K-12 pipeline is much weaker than

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May 17, 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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