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Author: Alex Usher

The Growth Budget We Aren’t Going to Get

There’s a federal budget coming later today.  I know, it’s hard to remember what one of those is like: it’s been 25 months and several hundred billion in unscheduled expenditures since we last had one.  As usual here at HESA Towers (well – virtual HESA Towers, or maybe HESA Towers-in-exile) will be bringing you analysis of what the budget means for post-secondary education.  But this morning, I thought I would give a sense of what I think is heading down

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April 19, 2021 No Comments

Laurentian Blues (8) Causes, Fault, and Lessons

Good morning.  I had hoped to get you a bit more detail about what has happened at Laurentian in the last few days, but as usual there is less info available than there should be.  Here’s what we know: Late Monday, the university released a list of 69 programs that have been discontinued.  Most of them are programs which have fewer than 30 students (in some cases considerably fewer), and a lot of these programs are in humanities, which is not

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April 15, 2021 15 Comments

Laurentian Blues (7) – The Process

Last week, the Laurentian University Senate met in a bizarre closed-door session to approve a package of cuts, the details of which are still mostly unknown.  On the basis of this, quite a number of people received termination notices at Laurentian University yesterday.  I have not seen any definitive numbers on losses (the university, typical of its entire approach through this crisis, is being crap at communicating actual information), but I have seen estimates of anywhere between 80 and 110

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April 13, 2021 11 Comments

That NDP Student Debt Forgiveness Promise

Today, I want to look at Jagmeet Singh’s recent promise that an NDP government would forgive up to $20,000 in federal student debt.  It was a fascinating little announcement, which is part-super-savvy and part deeply-perplexing. The announcement itself, which you can read in the NDP press release here,  says that an NDP government would i) eliminate interest on student loans because interest = profit, ii) bring in a 5-year waiting period before student loans became repayable and iii) forgive the first $20,000

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April 7, 2021 2 Comments

Federated Universities (A kind of Laurentian story)

Morning, everyone.  Apologies for the pause in posting: it’s been a rough few weeks, health-wise.  I am not 100% yet, and blogging might not be 4x per week for a little while, but time to get back in the saddle: there’s too much going on to sit on the sidelines. So, it’s a big day at Laurentian University.  The administration – or at least the tiny portion of if that actually knows what’s going on – has called a super-duper secret

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April 6, 2021 6 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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