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The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Author: Alex Usher

Time to Overhaul Apprenticeships

There are three ways in which Canada is an outlier in apprenticeships, none of which – so far as I can tell – are based on any principles other than “well that’s the way we’ve always done them”. The first way in which our apprenticeships are different is that they cover a more restricted set of occupations than other countries.  For us, “apprenticeships” are largely synonymous with construction trades and certain manufacturing fields.  Compare, for instance, our top ten apprenticeable

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March 13, 2023 2 Comments

Corruption in South African Higher Education

This week’s World of Higher Education podcast episode takes us to South Africa.  My guest today is Dr. Jonathan Jansen, a distinguished professor of education at Stellenbosch University, just outside Cape Town, and president of the Academy of Science in South Africa.  And we’re talking about his absolutely harrowing new book, Corrupted: A Study of Chronic Dysfunction in South African Universities. You may have heard tales over the past decade or so about various state agencies in South Africa having

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March 9, 2023 No Comments

International Women’s Day 2023

Today is a statistical overview for International Women’s Day. Let’s start by looking at student numbers.  Figure 1 gives us the long view on female participation in universities (sorry college folks: Statscan data for your sector is a mess prior to the 1990s).  Women represented about 20% of university students from the 1920s to the mid-1950s, apart from the years during World War 2.  Starting around 1955, women’s share of total enrolments began a steady climb.  By 1989, women passed

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March 8, 2023 No Comments

The Upskilling for Industry Initiative

Q.  I can’t keep track any more.  What’s this big new skills initiative that got some press a couple of weeks ago? A. The 2021 Budget contained a commitment to fund “an initiative to scale-up proven industry-led, third-party delivered approaches to upskill and redeploy workers to meet the needs of growing industries”.   Industry, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) had a competition to figure out who will deliver it, much like they had a competition to figure out how to

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March 7, 2023 No Comments

Two POVs on the Coming Student Grant Changes

The Canadian Alliance of Student Associations has started a new campaign, entitled #halfyourCSG.  It rails against the perceived risk of a 50% drop in the maximum value of the Canada Student Grant (CSG) come this fall.  This might be kind of a sleeper issue for PSE over the next few weeks, so it’s worth taking a look at what the issues are and how everything might play out. To recap the policy evolution here: in 2016 the Liberal government raised

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March 6, 2023 No 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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