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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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Some Curious Data From OECD Education at a Glance 2017

The OECD put out its annual Education at a Glance  publication yesterday.  No huge surprises except for the fact that they appear to have killed one of the most-used tables in the whole book (A.1.2, which compared tertiary attainment rates for 25-34 year olds by type of tertiary program – i.e. college

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NDP Leadership Race Notes

So the deadline to sign up for the federal NDP leadership passed a couple of weeks ago, and the first deadline for the mail-in ballots is next Monday.  So what to make of the four candidates and their views on post-secondary education?   Based on their platforms and a series of responses

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The Growing Importance of Fee Income

I made a little remark last week to the effect that on present trends, student fees would pass provincial funding as a source of revenue for universities by 2020-2021 and combined fed-prov government funding by 2025.  Based on my twitter feed, that seems to have got people quite excited.  But I should

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Tuition Fees in Canada, 2017-18

So, yesterday was the annual tuition fee data dump from Statscan.  Probably worth it to go over the data just a bit to see what the story is. The data everyone likes to focus on is the “average undergraduate tuition fee by province”.  This year, it looks like this (note

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Canadian University Finance Statistics (2015-16 Edition)

The 2015-16 version of Financial Information of Universities and Colleges Survey (which, confusingly, doesn’t include community colleges) was released over the summer.  As in previous years I’m going to do a little summary of what it tells us about how income and expenditure has change over one year and five years.  Just

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Did CIBC Really Just Call for Lower Tuition?

Last week, HuffPost ran a story highlighting a newsletter from CIBC Economics about higher education.  It was actually a pretty meandering letter (CIBC Economics pieces on higher education are usually notable for their interesting use of data and somewhat shallow understanding of actual policy – here’s an earlier example).  The newsletter touched on a number

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McMaster > McGill?

The Shanghai Rankings (technically, the Academic Ranking of World Universities) came out a couple of weeks ago.  This is the granddaddy of all international rankings; the one that started it all, and still perceived as the most stable and reliable measure of scientific hubs; essentially it measures large concentrations of

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Free Tuition Developments

One major trend of the last couple of years in global higher education has been the arrival of a wave of “free tuition” policies in jurisdictions that formerly charged them and which – in some cases – have substantial private higher education sectors.  But announcing free tuition is one thing:

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A Francophone University for Ontario?

On Monday, the Government of Ontario released a proposal for a francophone university in Ontario, saying, effectively, “it’s about time we had one”.  This came as a surprise to many, who wondered “well, what about University of Ottawa, Laurentian University and Glendon College?” But of course, none of these are truly francophone. Well,

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