The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Author: Alex Usher

The Workload Conundrum

One of the weirdest things about Canadian academia is how workload is defined. You’ve probably heard somewhere that professorial workload is “40-40-20”, that is, 40% teaching, 40% research, and 20% “service.” But this is not an actual description of anyone’s actual workload, which can vary enormously from year to year, it’s more a kind of general rule of thumb, like the Chinese Communist Party’s adage that Mao was 70% good and 30% bad. It’s meant to be taken seriously but

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September 24, 2024 8 Comments

Marc Miller Strikes Again

On Monday last week, the Liberals got humiliated in a pair of by-elections in Quebec and Manitoba. In response, the Liberal party decided it needed to regain some popularity and that the best way of doing so was to kick universities and colleges a bit. And so the Minister of Immigration (and unofficial National Minister of Higher Education) Marc Miller announced a set of changes to study visas and post-graduation work visas. (How do I know this was a sudden, unplanned

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September 23, 2024 3 Comments

What a Second Trump Presidency Could Mean for US Higher Education with Brendan Cantwell

Hi everyone. I’m Alex Usher, and this is the World of Higher Education Podcast. This fall, much of the world’s attention is focused on the United States, where Vice President Kamala Harris is squaring off with former President Donald Trump in the presidential election on November 5th. Education was one piece of the government apparatus where Trump 1. 0 was not actually all that radical. Yes, he appointed Betsy DeVos, a passionate advocate for private education and voucher schemes, to

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September 19, 2024 1 Comment

The Eighth Wonder of the World: Ontario College Finances to 2023-24

Over the summer some of the HESA team went through the financial statements of the 24 Ontario Community Colleges for both 2022-2023 and 2023-24 statements. It’s…well, pretty wild. Ontario colleges were going after international students pretty heavily before COVID. But in the two years since the pandemic mostly subsided, the numbers are crazy. We don’t know exactly how crazy because the Government of Ontario, in an amazing show of either incompetence or gutlessness, is now five months late in releasing

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September 18, 2024 6 Comments

A Sub-par Study on Returns to Education

Last Week, Royal Bank produced a study with the brash headline “Financial Returns After a Post-Secondary Education Have Diminished.” Within the limited terms of the limited methodology of the first half of the mini-paper, the headline is not entirely incorrect. But man, this is a disappointing piece of analysis from an organization with pretensions to thought leadership. So, what does this paper say? Basically, part 1 of the paper takes four data points for university (NOT all of post-secondary—strike one

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September 17, 2024 1 Comment

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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