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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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Federal Budget 2017
Morning all. A long night last night at HESA Towers as we covered Budget 2017, which contained an exhaustingly large list of little programs (as well as a few big ones) affecting post-secondary institutions. You can find our full budget analysis here. My thanks to the HESA crew – Paul,
The Next Big Skills Policy Agenda
So today is budget day. If the papers are anything to go by, there’s something big-ish in there about “skills” which will no doubt be presented as some massive benefit to the country’s middle class (and those trying to join it). I have difficulty imagining what might be announced since
Worst Higher Education Article of the Decade (So Far)
Stop the presses. I have found the worst education article of the decade so far. It is by Don & Alex Tapscott, and it is called The Blockchain Revolution and Higher Education. How dumb is it? Solar-powered flashlight dumb. Tripping over a cordless phone dumb. The problem is that because it’s
There is no Fourth Industrial Revolution
I am seeing an increasing number of otherwise thoughtful people in Canadian university and research circles going around talking about the “Fourth Industrial Revolution”. They need to stop. There is no such thing as the Fourth Industrial Revolution. It is a catch-phrase made us by Klaus Schwab, head of the
Lower Ed
It’s only March, but I’m declaring the Higher Ed book of the year competition closed. No one is going to beat Tressie McMillan Cottom’s book, Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy. It is genius. Before I start praising this book to the skies, it’s
Good Innovation Policy
Yesterday, we looked at what actually constitutes Innovation Policy. Today, I want to talk about what an ideal innovation policy would look like. I apologize in advance for the length of the post. So, the first ingredient in innovation policy is skills. But this term needs to be understood in
What Is Innovation/Innovation Policy, Anyway?
I write and tweet a lot about innovation policy, mainly with respect to my frustration with our current government’s two-dimensional views on the subject. I’ve been meaning to write a piece on how to do innovation policy right, but based on a number of conversations I’ve had with folks, I
The Free Tuition Impulse
A few weeks ago I presented yet more evidence about why free tuition was mostly a subsidy for the rich and was unlikely, on its own, to do very much with respect to equalizing access (scroll through here and here if you really want to read me on this subject, though I
Tea Leaves on the Rideau
Last Tuesday, federal Finance Minister Bill Morneau set the date for the federal budget for next Wednesday (March 22) and naturally people are wondering: what goodies are in store? Without being privy to any inside information, here’s my take on where we are going. At the press conference announcing the
Mega-Trends in International Higher Education – A Summary
Over the past few weeks, we’ve looked at some of the big changes going on in higher education globally. To wit: Higher education student numbers are continuing to rise around the world. This massification in many countries is being accompanied by stratification. Getting a “distinctive” degree at a prestige university
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