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Author: Alex Usher

A Research Agenda for Canadian Higher Education, Part 1

There is so much about Canadian higher education that we don’t know. Today, a list of the most important unknowns that I think are most important, organized by broad topic. Who Gets Into Post-Secondary Education: Also, Where and Why and For How Long? Our data on who gets into post-secondary education has got a little bit better in the last little while. For instance, check out this interesting piece by Tomasz Handler, Aneta Bonikowska and Marc Frenette which looks at Bachelor’s degree

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June 4, 2024 3 Comments

What if We Have Been Measuring Student Debt Wrong All Along?

I was just running the numbers on student debt in Ontario. They are interesting. Time used to be that the Provincial government published these numbers on its own. This Ontario open data set has data from 2003-04 to 2011-12. Since then, I have been filing FOI requests and the government have been providing identical basis. Figure 1 shows the results, according to the administrative data held by the Government of Ontario. Turns out that based on this data—which should be

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June 3, 2024 3 Comments

2 Topics, 1 Episode: Germany Higher Education and U-Multirank

A bit of a change this week. Our scheduled episode with Dr. Andrea Peto and Dr. Jo-Anne Dillabough about illiberal universities has been moved to next week. This week, instead, we’re trying a little experiment: talking to my colleague, Dr. Gero Federkeil, who is head of international projects at the Centrum für Hochschulentwicklung, or Center for Higher Education, in Gütersloh, Germany, about two totally unrelated topics. The first has to do with the changing profile of university enrolments in Germany,

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May 30, 2024 No Comments

Budgets, Trust, and POVs

It’s been an interesting couple of weeks for me. It’s end of term/conference season, and so I get a lot of requests to go around the country speaking to Boards, Senates, leadership groups, etc. And the most interesting parts of these discussions are the Q&As, particularly when the same theme crops up multiple times. And the bits that keep coming up are around budgeting. There’s an obvious reason why everyone is worried about budgeting. It’s because the sector is screwed.

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May 29, 2024 2 Comments

Aggravatingly Clueless

Much of the current discourse about international students sounds something like this: “We love international students, it’s just that we want them to get a more Canadian-oriented education. They shouldn’t be in global business programs, they should be in trades programs, they should be in health programs. You know, things that contribute to Canadian society. If only we enrolled international students in these programs, we could let in more and more of them”. This is, simply, a combination of wishful

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May 28, 2024 3 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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