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Author: Alex Usher

How to Write a Campus History

Among the many, many things I never thought I would do before getting into this line of work is reading a whole ton of campus histories.  Seriously, I will read almost anything like this.  It’s about the first thing I do when I get to a campus: head to the bookstore and try to find an institutional history.   And having thus become something of a connoisseur, I can give you an overview about the state of the art. Basically, there is a

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May 6, 2021 2 Comments

Two Sets of Provincial Budgets

Most years, I do a spring round-up of provincial budgets as they relate to post-secondary education.  Last year was a wash-out because some budgets didn’t happen until the fall, but this year almost everyone has managed to bring one in more or less on time (the exception being Newfoundland and Labrador, where the budget was delayed by a rather needless election that managed to take about four months to complete).  So, today I am going to look at what has

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May 5, 2021 4 Comments

All Hands on Deck

Alberta wasn’t the only province to release a report on post-secondary education last Thursday.  Out in St. John’s, the three commissioners of the Independent Review of the Post-Secondary Education System in Newfoundland and Labrador finally, after much delay, published its report, pithily entitled All Hands on Deck.   Just to give you a rundown on the province before we get into the report: Newfoundland and Labrador has two multi-campus institutions, Memorial University of Newfoundland (MUN for short) and the College of the

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May 4, 2021 No Comments

That Alberta PSE Strategy (Finally)

Last Thursday, the Government of Alberta finally released the long-awaited Alberta 2030: Building Skills for Jobs strategy, optimistically subtitled “a 10-year strategy for post-secondary education”.   So, after all the hullaballoo of the last year or so, what does it all mean for the province’s universities and colleges? Let’s get the process stuff out of the way first.   The province did kind of publish some of the background research McKinsey did for $3.5M.  It’s incorporated in this 217-page power point (no, I am not kidding).  Conceivably, this

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May 3, 2021 1 Comment

Two New Data Points on the Effects of Tuition Fees

Over the past two decades, tuition rises in Canada have been relatively low: on average, we consistently see rises of about 1-2% above inflation, with almost no sudden upwards jags (though there was one sudden decrease when the Ford government cut tuition by 10% in Ontario in 2019).  This is quite different from the 1990s, when rises of inflation plus 5-6% was the norm and instances of tuition doubling (Quebec, 1990 to 1992) or increasing by over 50% (British Columbia,

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April 29, 2021 2 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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