Author: Alex Usher

2021 PSE Platforms – The Conservative Party

Alright, fam.  You know the drill.  It’s a federal election, so between now and September 20th, I’ll be looking at various party manifestos to see what they portend for our sector, and then finishing up with some comparative analysis.  I am not entirely sure how many parties I will do: I never do the Bloc for obvious reasons, so that leaves three and *maybe* a fourth if the Greens get their act together to release any policies and stop behaving

Read More »

Inter-provincial Student Mobility

We talk a lot about international student mobility in Canada.  But what about inter-provincial student mobility?  Let’s go find out. In 2018-19, the last year for which data is available, the proportion of Canadian undergraduates who were studying in another province was about 8.4%.  As Figure 1 shows, this proportion has been increasing very slowly for the last thirty years (the precipitous drop in 1996-97 has to do with Quebec universities not reporting data in that year, something which I am pretty

Read More »

Back With a Jab

Morning all.  Ready to go?  No, me neither.  But the show must go on. It’s going to be a busy few weeks.  Our annual State of Post-Secondary Education in Canada comes out on Thursday.  We’ve got an election on September 20th, which may have some pretty significant consequences for post-secondary education (the childcare accords of the last few months are hugely consequential for higher education in a way that has not properly been appreciated, and I’ll be writing on that subject later

Read More »

Nova Scotia Manifesto Analysis (Summer Edition)

Morning all.  Hope you are having a good summer.  Just returning briefly to the blog because Nova Scotia goes to the polls today, and in the ancient, decade-long tradition of this blog (ten years ago last week, the blog debuted with this piece to a beta audience of about 100) I gotta do a manifesto analysis.  So, here goes. The NDP manifesto commitments on PSE are disappointingly thin.  The entirety of their platform is i) “(work) towards eliminating tuition fees, beginning with tuition fees

Read More »

‘til September

So, it’s that time of year when I say farewell to faithful readers for a few months.  This is the last blog of the academic year.  Normal service will resume August 30th. Today also marks the end of this blog’s tenth year.  Which, you know, is a bit terrifying.  Because that means this blog is probably over a million words old.  I’m sure my mother would have preferred I spent all that time on a doctorate.  (You should think about

Read More »