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Author: Alex Usher

Micro-credentials: The Path of Least Resistance

Last month, Andreas Schleicher, the head of the OECD’s Education Directorate, gave a lecture to the Higher Education Policy Institute in London  and made a series of statements around micro-credentials which were both accurate and at the same time seriously naïve.  Basically, he accused universities of stifling microcredentials because for them, life was “actually very comfortable. You bundle content, delivery, accreditation – you can get a quite nice monopoly rent.” There was, he continued, little incentive for universities to change because

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April 4, 2023 3 Comments

PEI Election Manifesto Review

Today is election day in Prince Edward Island, and so that also makes it HESA Towers Manifesto Review Day.  Buckle up!  One of the things that makes PEI adorable is how tiny all its politics are.  Like, in other provinces, manifestoes might make a general nod towards K-12 capital spending, but on the Island, parties will make specific promises about renovations to specific junior high schools.   But then again, perhaps not surprising when the province is only barely larger than the combined staff/student population of the University

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April 3, 2023 No Comments

Budget Commentary 2023

Hello all. As usual, HESA Towers has been hard at work to bring you our budget commentary, which is available here. While there is the odd good news story in here – like more money for applied research in colleges – in the main, this is probably the worst budget for the higher education sector in years.  An $800 million year-on-year reduction in money for student grants – long foreshadowed, not by any means a breach of promise (the injection

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March 28, 2023 2 Comments

Budget Basics

At around 4PM today, the Minister of Finance, Chrystia Freeland will rise in the House of Commons to deliver her third, and the Trudeau government’s seventh, federal budget.  This is a good opportunity to give y’all a peak at how the sausage gets made, and how lobby/interest groups play a role in the development of budgets. The annual budget cycle starts pretty much the minute the previous one ends.  During spring time, the government spends its time working out how

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March 28, 2023 No Comments

Research Re-shuffle

The Advisory Panel on the Federal Research Support System released its report last week while I was playing boulevardier in Tokyo with Little Miss Sumo (somehow, I’d never really noticed what an enormous fraction of the city’s economy and real estate is devoted to cube toys and claw machines).  It’s more interesting than the usual Ottawa report, and not just because of the murky politics. The report begins with a problematique wheremost of the space was devoted to telling the

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March 27, 2023 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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