Author: Alex Usher

Three Developments on the International Students File

First, there is the Conestoga-Sault College stand-off. You have probably already seen this one, but I have to point it out anyways, because it’s the most objectively hilarious thing that’s happened in years. Briefly, Sault College President David Orazietti made some comments to the effect that Conestoga President John Tibbits (the man who brought in 30,000 international students into southwestern Ontario, built new campuses to house them all and named one of them after himself) was the “bad actor” which

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Alex Usher on Canadian Higher Education

This is the World of Higher Education podcast. I’m Tiffany MacLennan, one of the producers of the World of Higher Education Podcast, usually a Research Associate at HESA, but currently a full-time master’s student. About two years ago, I pitched the idea of a podcast to Alex to which he said no but after a lot of consistent begging, here we are at season 2 episode 19. So far, I would say we’ve had great success with this project. We

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Ball State vs. Stanford

When higher education wants to talk about itself in positive terms, the story it likes to tell is a story like the one of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. You can read about Stanford’s history in books like Annalee Saxenian’s Regional Advantage and to a lesser extent Rebecca Lowen’s Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford. The story goes something like this: “we do lots of great scientific work here, and businesses interested in our Intellectual Property

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Students and the Labour Market: It’s Better Than You Think

I was playing around with Labour Force Survey data this past weekend (as one does) and found some stuff worth sharing. Ready? Let’s go. First, let’s look at student employment rates. One of those things that “everyone knows” is that student employment levels are continually rising. Bur in fact this is anything but true: data shows that the employment rate of full-time students, at around 40%, is pretty much what it has been since the turn of the century. There

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Lagging

I was perusing a Chronicle of Higher Education article on American state expenditures on post-secondary education when I saw a completely jaw-dropping graph. Figure 1: Jaw-Dropping Visual from The Chronicle on State Funding I mean…wow. Right? This figure actually lines up with something I had noticed a few months ago about state-level spending in the 1960s and 1970s. Though there is lots of talk about “wars on higher education” in the United States; in fact, there isn’t a very tight

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