The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Author: Alex Usher

Demography, Incentives, and the Future of Canadian PSE

Let’s start with a little history. Figure 1 shows the evolution of the youth population (aged 18-21) in Canada from 1971 to 2022.   The remarkable thing here is that this demographic group peaked over 40 years ago.  What that means is that pretty much all the nearly tripled increase in domestic enrolments in the last four have come from increasing participation rates rather than population growth. Figure 1: Population Aged 18-21, by Region, Canada, 1971-2022 This growth has not been

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September 25, 2023 3 Comments

Confessions of a Minor Bureaucrat at a Chinese University

Hello everyone. I’m Alex Usher and this is the World of Higher Education Podcast. One of the hardest things in comparative international higher education studies is getting a sense of how other countries’ systems actually work. If you look at statistical compendiums – say, OECD’s Education at a Glance – there is a tendency to imagine all systems as identical because they all in one way or another push out a similar palette of outputs: bachelor’s degrees, master’s degrees, doctorates,

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September 21, 2023 No Comments

Education at a Glance 2023

The OECD’s annual Education at a Glance (EAG) report came out last week.  It’s a One Thought tradition to go through this report in detail for the latest international comparisons on institutional income and participation rates, but I’m going to mostly forego that this year.  That’s partially because I have a doozy of a piece coming out on finance in a week or two, but also because this year’s EAG contains some interesting special topics worth looking at, particularly with

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September 20, 2023 1 Comment

Food: An Aristotelian Strategy

These days, everyone is wondering about how to create more of a feeling of community on campus.  This isn’t just about getting students comfortable within a campus community, which is key to improving completion rates and raising student satisfaction. In many places it’s also about finding ways to get through what a seemingly worsening set of relations between faculty members and administration, Boards and senates, etc.  So how to get more, shall we say, esprit de corps?  I say, read

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September 19, 2023 4 Comments

Visa Caps “Lite”

Last week, it was revealed that Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) is trending towards using “Trusted Institution Status” instead of caps on visas.*  The idea is not to decrease the number of visas overall, but to allow “trusted” institutions to access expedited visa processing.  Why is this important?  One, visa processing isn’t really a 12-month thing. Processing clusters during certain points of the year and IRCC doesn’t want to hire seasonal staff to compensate for these points. Two, several

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September 18, 2023 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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