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Author: Alex Usher

Manitoba on Strike (Again)

To Winnipeg, where the University of Manitoba Faculty Association (UMFA) has gone on strike for the second time in five years.  It probably won’t be the last institution to see labour action this year (see Ken Steele’s very good round-up of boiling-over labour issues here).  The main issue is over money.  UMFA’s central claim is that its members have lower salaries than anyone else in the U-15 and that over the past few years UFMA have lost approximately 8% of

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November 4, 2021 2 Comments

Same But Different (Part 2)

Yesterday, I outlined the key similarities between the US and Canadian higher education systems.  Today, let’s talk differences.  The most obvious dissimilarity is some of the institutional forms. Religious colleges are much thicker in the ground in the US, as are liberal arts colleges (neither is unknown in Canada, but they take up a lot less space).  Community colleges look vastly different: in Canada they are their own sector, with most programs leading to stand-alone vocational credentials, though “vocational” is

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November 3, 2021 1 Comment

Same But Different (Part 1)

One of the challenges I find in doing comparative higher education work is that because everyone in the field went to university, they think they know what a university is.  But the fact is universities around the world are different: they are run on different logics; they aspire to do different things and hence can have differing operational processes.  Making useful comparisons, or trying to infer motives for institutional actions in other countries, can be very difficult. One of the

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November 2, 2021 1 Comment

Affordability, 2021

StatsCan released its annual survey of tuition fees at universities last month (it does not bother to collect similar data with colleges, because reasons).  Average domestic undergraduate fees looked like this: Figure 1: Average Undergraduate Tuition, by Province, 2021-22 Only two things to note here.  First, Ontario fees keep falling relative to other provinces because of the Ford government’s freeze on tuition (for which, hilariously, it continues to receive no political credit). For most of the past decade, Ontario was

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November 1, 2021 1 Comment

Water

Big day at HESA Towers as it’s the return of our Academic Programs Team’s series Monitoring Trends in Academic Programming (MTAP), a project led by Jonathan McQuarrie.   This edition is about programs which focus on Water, and you can read it here. It’s also the first MTAP with a co-author, Tiffany MacLennan.  And if you like that, do read our previous issues on there are previous editions on programming in Health, programming in  Agriculture/ Aquaculture and in the Humanities. The keen eyed among you

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October 28, 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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