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Category: One Thought to Start Your Day

Truth and Reconciliation, Ten Years On

Today is September 30th, National Day for Truth and Reconciliation and Orange Shirt Day. It has been just over ten years since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission issued its report, and so this seemed like a good time to review the state of Truth and Reconciliation – and Indigenous issues generally – on Canadian campuses. So, I am teaming up today with Mark Solomon, Associate Vice-President Reconciliation and Inclusion at Seneca Polytechnic to put together some thoughts on what progress

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September 30, 2025 1 Comment

Education at a Glance 2025, Part 2

Three weeks ago, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released its annual stat fest, Education at a Glance (see last week’s blog for more on this year’s higher education and financing data). The most interesting thing about this edition is that the OECD chose to release some new data from the recent Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) relating to literacy and numeracy levels that were included in the PIAAC 2013 release (see also here), but not in the December

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September 29, 2025 1 Comment

Testing Times & Interesting Discussions

Last week, The Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) put out a discussion paper called Testing Times: Fending Off A Crisis in Post-Secondary Education, which in part is the outcome of a set of cross-country discussions held this summer by RBC, HESA, and the Business Higher Education Roundtable. (BHER). The paper, I think, sums up the current situation pretty well: the system is not at a starvation point but is heading in that direction pretty quickly and that needs to be

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September 24, 2025 4 Comments

Education at a Glance 2025, Part 1

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released its annual stat fest, Education at a Glance (EAG), two weeks ago and I completely forgot about it. But since not a single Canadian news outlet wrote anything about it (neither it nor the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada saw fit to put together a “Canada” briefing, apparently), this blog – two weeks later than usual – is still technically a scoop. Next week, I will review some new data

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September 23, 2025 No Comments

Turning the Corner

Things have been bleak in higher education the last couple of years, and no doubt they will remain bleak for a while. But it recently became clear to me how we’ll know that we are turning the corner: it will be the moment when provincial governments start allowing significant rises in domestic tuition. This became clear to me when I was having a discussion with a senior provincial official (in a province I shall not name) about tuition. I was

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September 22, 2025 4 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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