Category: Blogs

Focus Friday: October 10

Hi everyone, Tiffany here. A quick reminder that there is a Focus Friday session today (October 10) from 12:30–1:30pm Eastern on the Student Experience. I’ll be joined by Wasiimah Joomun (Executive Director, Canadian Alliance of Student Associations), Brendan Roberts (Executive Director, Students Nova Scotia), and Olamipo Ogunnote (Director of Advocacy and Strategic Partnerships, Ontario Student Voices) for a conversation on student experience—from campus culture and communication to what feels most different about being a student today. If you haven’t registered

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Capitalizing on College: Mission, Money, and Survival in Higher Ed with Joshua Travis Brown

The economics of higher education are tricky.  It’s a labour-intensive industry, and generally speaking the cost of producing labour-intensive goods will always increase faster than the price of producing capital intensive goods, because the latter have more scope for increasing productivity. That’s not a problem if you are a public institution in a country with bottomless pockets, or if you are a prestigious private institution with almost unlimited ability to raise prices. If you’re among the other 99 percent of the

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That Was The Quarter That Was, Summer 2025

Welcome to TWTQTW for June-September. Things were a little slow in July, but with back to school happening in most of the Northern Hemisphere sometime between last August and late September, the stories began pouring in.  You might think that “back to school” would deliver up lots of stories about enrolment trends, but you’d mostly be wrong. While few countries are as bad as Canada when it comes to up-to date enrolment data, it’s a rare country that can give

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Three Notable StatsCan Papers

Over the summer, Statistics Canda put out a few papers on higher education and immigration which got zero press but nevertheless are interesting enough that I thought you might all want to hear about them. Below are my précis:  The first paper, Recent trends in immigration from Canada to the United States by Feng Hou, Milly Yang and Yao Lu, is a very general look at outbound migration to the United States, looking  specifically at the characteristics of Canadian citizens

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Notes on Research Policy, Here and Abroad

Hi all. I thought I would take some time to have a chat about how research policy is evolving in other countries, because I think there are some lessons we need to learn here in Canada. One piece of news that struck me this week came from Switzerland, where the federal government is slashing the budget of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) by 20%. If the Swiss, a technological powerhouse of a nation, with a broad left-right coalition in

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