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Category: One Thought to Start Your Day

How Program Closure Decisions Get Made

A lot of institutions, in reaction to recent changes are going through program closure (or in politer terms “program suspensions” which in theory means they might get resurrected at some point be revived or saved, but don’t bet the house on it). So, it’s worth going through how these decisions tend to get made. Contrary to what you might hear, “low enrollment” technically is not the reason anyone closes a program: it’s a bit more complicated than that. The real

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March 3, 2025 3 Comments

Ontario Election Manifestos 2025

Y’all know I do one of these for every provincial election. This one is going to be a bit different because this time out E-Day is eight days away, and next week is a scheduled off-week for the blog. As of the moment I am writing this on Tuesday afternoon, only two parties have made any commitments on postsecondary education and only one has released a fully-costed platform. So, there’s a bit of guesswork involved here. I will update the

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February 19, 2025 1 Comment

How We Choose to Respond to Crises

I was thinking the other day that next Thursday (27/02/25) is not only going to be the Ontario election—about which, more tomorrow—but also because it will be the 30th anniversary of the legendary 1995 federal budget. If you’re under 45, a lot of what I am about to tell you is going to sound very odd. But it is all true, and it all matters. This country was a hot mess in the early 1990s. The summer 1990 unemployment rate

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February 18, 2025 3 Comments

Fun with Participation Rate Data

Just a quick one today, mostly charts. Back in the fall, StatsCan released a mess of data from the Labour Force Survey looking at education participation rates—that is, the percentage of any given age cohort that is attending education—over the past 25 years. So, let’s go see what it says. Figure 1 shows total education participation rates, across all levels of education, from age 15 to 29, for selected years over the past quarter century. At the two ends of

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February 12, 2025 1 Comment

That NIH Thing You’re Hearing About

If you’re in the higher education field, you have probably heard a lot in the last four days about the Trump regime reducing funding to the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—roughly the equivalent of our Canadian Institutes of Health Research, only with a budget four times larger even after adjusting for population size. Specifically, the Trump administration is limiting the amount of overhead costs that institutions can recover from government. Cue much shouting in the US about adverse impacts, destruction

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February 11, 2025 No Comments
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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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