Category: One Thought to Start Your Day

BC Election Manifesto Analysis 2026

I shouldn’t have to write this blog. This Saturday’s provincial election is completely unnecessary. But we’re having it anyways because the galaxy-brains around Premier Dave Eby couldn’t figure out in time that a catastrophically divided opposition might just become less catastrophically divided if faced with the threat of an imminent election.  Anyways.  This is not a good election for post-secondary education. Maybe not quite the worst I’ve ever seen in my fifteen-odd years of doing this, but it’s close. I’ll

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Interprovincial Student Mobility

I haven’t looked at the state of interprovincial student mobility in Canada in awhile (last time was back here in 2021) and today seems like as good a time as any to catch up on the latest data. Ready? Let’s go! First, a quick methodological note here: this data does not include colleges (very, very few college students choose to study out-of-province, on the order of about 2%) and at the university level includes students at all degree levels but

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The AI Challenge is Coming into Focus

Morning all. I have some thoughts today on how AI is likely to affect teaching and assessment in higher education. A few weeks ago, I was at an event hosted by RBC, which was kind of a fireside chat with Anthropic’s Head of North American Government Affairs, Brian Peters. This was shortly after Anthropic released this think piece on AI and economic growth that asked people to contemplate the prospect of 15% annual GDP growth thanks to the miracle of

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British Columbia in a Nutshell (2026)

Morning all. A few years ago, I did a series of pieces on provincial higher education systems (for example, back here). I thought I would return to these five or so years later to see what has changed.  I’ll be running these periodically over the next eight months or so, but I thought I would start today with BC – where there is a provincial election in a few days’ time – and head east from there. So, British Columbia.

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The Contemptible OSAP Cover-Up

If you have been paying only casual attention to the Ontario Student Assistance file over the past few months and seen headlines like this one from July, where the province suspended several private colleges from the program, and this one from last week, where the province sicced the Ontario Provincial Police on unnamed private colleges and suspended all private institutions from receiving OSAP funding, you might be under the impression that the Ontario government is very serious about protecting the

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