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Category: Blogs

Provincial Budgets 2025-26

Ok everyone, all the provincial budgets are in and so it’s time for our annual look at what another round of irresponsible pan-partisan political leadership has wrought for our sector for the next twelve months. Figure 1 shows the province-by-province breakdown of this year’s budgets, showing the change in transfers to institutions in real dollars over 1 year and 5 years for each of the ten provinces. In most provinces, collecting this data is pretty easy—you just look at the

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May 20, 2025 1 Comment

Between Excellence and Relevance: The Regional University Dilemma

Hi everyone.  I’m Alex Usher and this is The World of Higher Education podcast. Over the past few decades, Higher Education had taken on a number of new roles.  As we discussed with Ethan Schrum on this podcast over two years, in the years after World War II, universities became obsessed with showing how essential they were with solving society’s problems.  One of these problems – particularly as universities proliferated and started showing up in more and more distant locales – was regional

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May 15, 2025 No Comments

Two Ideas Long Overdue for Adoption

Two mini thoughts today rather than one long one. But they are both ideas which I think deserve to be taken more seriously than they currently are. Mergers that Make Sense You may recall that a few months ago, I skewered the idea that institutional mergers were a useful path to take for the purpose of cutting costs. But the more I have been thinking about it, there may be a pretty good case—at least in a few places—of mergers for

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May 14, 2025 3 Comments

The End of Participation Growth

One of the things that I find extremely worrying about higher education policy these days is that we’ve simply stopped talking about increasing access to the system. Oh, sure, you will hear lots of talk about affordability, that is, making the system cheaper—and hence arguments about the correct level of tuition fees—but that’s not the same. Even to the extent that these things did meaningfully affect accessibility (and it’s not at all clear that they do), no one phrases their

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May 13, 2025 3 Comments

Ono’s Arc

When Santa Ono first showed up at UBC in 2016, the general reaction was one of mild bemusement—or, more specifically, a feeling of “who dat?” Although Ono is Canadian by origin (born in Vancouver), he grew up and spent more or less his entire career in the United States, apart from taking his doctorate in experimental Medicine at McGill. His last job before coming north was as president of the University of Cincinnati, which is a decent school with a

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May 12, 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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