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Author: Alex Usher

The End of Participation Growth

One of the things that I find extremely worrying about higher education policy these days is that we’ve simply stopped talking about increasing access to the system. Oh, sure, you will hear lots of talk about affordability, that is, making the system cheaper—and hence arguments about the correct level of tuition fees—but that’s not the same. Even to the extent that these things did meaningfully affect accessibility (and it’s not at all clear that they do), no one phrases their

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May 13, 2025 3 Comments

Ono’s Arc

When Santa Ono first showed up at UBC in 2016, the general reaction was one of mild bemusement—or, more specifically, a feeling of “who dat?” Although Ono is Canadian by origin (born in Vancouver), he grew up and spent more or less his entire career in the United States, apart from taking his doctorate in experimental Medicine at McGill. His last job before coming north was as president of the University of Cincinnati, which is a decent school with a

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May 12, 2025 4 Comments

The Fifteen: May 9, 2025

Welcome to the sixteenth edition of The Fifteen. We track research funding shake-ups in Brussels’ ERC “supergrants” and a defence-focused tweak to Horizon Europe. Meanwhile, higher education resources continue to be stretched thin: half of UK universities are axing courses under financial duress, and US public colleges face a looming crisis driven by proposed cuts to Medicaid. We look at student union leaders’ fight with their predecessors, now turned politicians, and track Labour’s big win in Australia. Finally, a set

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May 9, 2025 No Comments

Banking on Human Capital: How RBC Sees the Future of Talent, Innovation, and the Role of Post-Secondary Institutions

Canada’s heading into some pretty choppy waters in 2025. For a century or so, we’ve had a one track economic strategy, closer integration with the United States. Now, the Trump administration with its faith in tariffs as an instrument of both power and corruption, has essentially nuked that strategy, at least as far as the trading goods is concerned. There’s a lot of change coming to Canada, and it’ll be costly. In much the same way that diplomatic evolution and

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May 8, 2025 1 Comment

Probably not the next Laurentian, but…..

As I noted yesterday, there are only two institutions in Canada which have run deficits in each of the last five years: St. Thomas University (STU) and Vancouver Island University (VIU). In both instances, these institutions have had deficits averaging between 4 and 5% of their total income over the course of those five years. By any definition, this puts them on some kind of watch list. As Figures 1 and 2 show, the root cause of both institutions’ problems

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May 7, 2025 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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