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Author: Alex Usher

Funny Math in Alberta

Many of my Canadian readers will likely have read a piece that has been circulating on the internet from Kim Siever, a self-described leftist internet journalist from Lethbridge.  The headline says it all: UCP Government to Cut Post-Secondary Spending by $1.5 Billion; That Number Rises to $3.5 Billion if you Factor in Inflation and Population Growth.  You know how I am always on about Economic Impact Analyses always being forms of competitive counting? Methodologically speaking, this is worse. Ok, so here’s

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December 1, 2021 No Comments

Measuring Quality as if Quality Mattered

Last week, a colleague on Twitter (Hi, Brendan!) asked – possibly rhetorically – whether it was possible to measure quality in higher education.  I took the bait and thought I would formulate my response here. Not everyone agrees, but I think in almost every aspect of higher education, quality can be evaluated.  Not always in strictly quantitative ways, but certainly in ways that allow general comparison across similar units or organizations.  But the important thing is that quality needs to

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November 30, 2021 3 Comments

StatsCan Enrolment Day 2021

Last Wednesday was StatsCan Enrolment Day, 2021.  Now, this does not of course mean that we now have data on enrolments for 2021.  That won’t happen for another couple of years.  No, what it means is that we have data for 2019-20, so we are only about 25 months behind reality instead of the 37 months behind that we were last Tuesday. (StatsCan is capable of faster work.  Heck, it can get university tuition fee increases more or less right

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November 29, 2021 1 Comment

Waiting for the Arbitrator

We are now on Day 23 of a strike at the University of Manitoba, where the two sides genuinely did not start all that far apart.  Binding arbitration looms.  How did it get to this point? To really understand what’s going on here, one must go back to 2016.  In that year, the University of Manitoba Faculty Association (UMFA) went on strike over a combination of governance and salary issues.  They ended up winning a good chunk of what they

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November 24, 2021 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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