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Author: Alex Usher

Nova Scotia in a Nutshell

As you may know, the HESA Towers team spends part of every summer compiling The State of Post-Secondary Education in Canada, which tracks national trends in higher education.  But what we don’t often do is go a level below that, to look in depth at what’s happening in individual provinces and how these developments compare to what is going on in other parts of the country.   So, for the next few weeks, we are presenting a statistical portrait of what

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April 21, 2022 No Comments

Tennessee’s Free Tuition Experiment Reconsidered

Long time readers may remember about six years ago I examined a program known as the Tennessee Promise, one of the earlier “free tuition” programs in the US.  Technically, it was not a “free tuition” scheme, but rather what was known as a “last dollar scholarship”, meaning that after applying all other scholarships or need-based aid, the state brings the “net tuition” to zero.  What I found was that if you looked just at students coming out of secondary school

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April 20, 2022 1 Comment

Institutional Strategic Plans: Control v. Vision

Here are a couple of quick thoughts on institutional strategic plans and how they tend to fall into two big categories. Most institutions typically prefer plans that are about control.  That is, they want the plans to focus people’s agendas within an organization on a few key goals.  Sometimes these plans take the form of task-lists; other times they are focussed on a few institution-wide goals, complete with metrics (not surprisingly, these are the kinds of plans that the big

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April 19, 2022 1 Comment

The Auditor General on Laurentian

Last Wednesday, the Ontario Auditor-General (AG) released a damning interim report on the Laurentian insolvency.  Because of its interim nature – the AG does not think it likely her office will finish a full report before the Legislature is prorogued for the June election – it does not do justice to the subject.  However, it does make three specific claims, which I think are hugely important and could pave the way for some key resignations at Laurentian.    For some time, I

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April 18, 2022 2 Comments

New Graduate Outcomes Data

I haven’t written about graduate labour market outcomes recently, and the good folks at the Council of Ontario Universities just published some new data on the class of 2018, so today seems like the day to come back to this topic. The main reason to use Ontario data to do this is because a) it’s available, b) it provides a useful amount of breakdown by discipline and c) it has a nice long time series.  The Statistics Canada Education and

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April 14, 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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