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Category: Apprenticeships, Skills & Trades

Getting Serious about Apprenticeships

As I noted back on Monday, for a variety of deeply atavistic reasons, Canadian political parties have decided that the knowledge economy is out and some kind of 1960s economy based, improbably, on the construction industry, is in. And so, similarly, postsecondary students are out along with colleges and universities, while apprentices and skilled trades are in. Which, you know, whatever. Fine. But if we are going to do this, parties need to start developing policies which will improve our

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April 30, 2025 2 Comments

Deafening Silence on PIAAC

Last month, right around the time the blog was shutting down, the OECD released its report on the second iteration of the Programme for International Assessment for Adult Competencies (PIAAC), titled “Do Adults Have the Skills They Need to Thrive in a Changing World?”. Think of it perhaps as PISA for grown-ups, providing a broadly useful cross-national comparison of basic cognitive skills which are key to labour market success and overall productivity. You are forgiven if you didn’t hear about

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January 7, 2025 No Comments

The Road Ahead for International Students

You could be forgiven if, after the last few months, you thought that Canadian post-secondary institutions should be turning their attention away from international students. But nothing could be further from the truth. The underlying dynamics of international student recruitment have not changed—institutions still need money and provincial governments are basically united in their determination to prevent them from getting it from domestic sources—only the tactics going forward have. Let’s start on the college side. Their business has mostly been

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November 5, 2024 6 Comments

Aggravatingly Clueless

Much of the current discourse about international students sounds something like this: “We love international students, it’s just that we want them to get a more Canadian-oriented education. They shouldn’t be in global business programs, they should be in trades programs, they should be in health programs. You know, things that contribute to Canadian society. If only we enrolled international students in these programs, we could let in more and more of them”. This is, simply, a combination of wishful

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May 28, 2024 3 Comments

The College Program Apocalypse

A lot of people have been speculating about what’s going to happen in the Ontario College sector now that its use of the money-printing machine of ever-increasing international student numbers has been shut off. Some have speculated about Laurentian-style bankruptcies. I think that’s extraordinarily unlikely given the way this is playing out. I do think some significant changes—sometimes quite deleterious ones—are going to occur in Ontario post-secondary. It’s just that it’s going to happen at the level of individual programs,

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May 21, 2024 4 Comments

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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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