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Category: Blogs

The Shrinking Research University Business Model

For most of the past 30 or so years, big Canadian universities have all been working off more or less the same business model: find areas where you can make big profits and use those profits to make yourself more research-intensive. That’s it. That’s the whole model. International students? Big profit centres. Professional programs? You better believe those are money-makers. Undergraduate studies – well, they might not make that much money in toto but holy moly first-year students are taken

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September 16, 2025 6 Comments

Born on Third Base

Cast your minds back to January of 2024, when the federal government suddenly decided that housing was an issue, international students were the problem and implemented a complicated and irritating-to-implement set of caps that were 35% lower nationally than for 2023 (and in Ontario significantly more than that). Then, in 2025 came another set of changes including a 10% cut in the national limit. And then, on top of that, a set of new conditions on post-graduate work visas were

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September 15, 2025 6 Comments

Introducing Focus Friday

Hi everyone, I’m excited to share a new initiative we’re launching this fall: Focus Friday. Focus Friday is a biweekly webinar series that brings people together around some of the most pressing issues in higher education. Each session runs for an hour and features a few short conversations with invited guests, followed by an open, coffee-chat style discussion where everyone can join in. The goal is simple: create space to share ideas, meet new people across the sector, and learn from one another.

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September 12, 2025 No Comments

Higher Ed at the Ballot Box: Australia’s Election and the Accord with Andrew Norton

It’s been about eighteen months since this podcast last visited Australia. The story at the time was about something called “the Universities Accord”, an oddly-named expert panel report which was supposed to give the Labor government a roadmap for re-structuring a higher education system widely believed to be under enormous stress.  Since then, lots has happened. There’s been an international student visa controversy, a whole ton of cutbacks at institutions (including a quite wild polycrisis at Australian National Universities) and

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September 11, 2025 No Comments

The Coming Federal Cuts – Part 3: ISED

Monday, we looked at the country’s overall financial situation (dire), and yesterday we looked at how cuts of a magnitude of 15% might affect key programs like the Canada Education Savings Program and the Canada Student Financial Assistance Program. Today, we’re going to look at how a 15% cut might affect the Government of Canada’s research subsidies, which in the main are run through the Ministry of innovation, Science and Economic Development (ISED).  (I will be speaking about “the tri-councils”

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September 10, 2025 2 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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