Category: Blogs

Overskilled and Underused? What PIAAC Reveals About the Canadian Workforce

Before our show starts today, I just wanna take a minute to note the passing of Professor Claire Callender, OBE. For the last two and a half decades, she’s been one of the most important figures in UK higher education studies, in particular with respect to student loans and student finance. Holder of a joint professorship at UCL Institute of Education and Birkbeck University of London, she was also instrumental in setting up the ESRC Centre for Global Higher Education,

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Election 2025: The Conservative Party Manifesto

Ok, the Conservatives finally released their platform yesterday. It’s…thin…so far as postsecondary education goes. It’s absolutely nothing like the extremely detailed and nerdy platform in 2021 which, let us recall, was released on Day 1 of the campaign (I remain firm in my belief that an Erin O’Toole-led Conservative Party would be walking away with this election). And there are definitely no signs of a reversion to the Harper era and it’s too often unremarked interest in Big Science and investments in major research

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Election 2025: The Liberal Party Manifesto

Today, I’m doing the Liberals, mainly because at the time of writing on Easter Sunday they have issued an actual full platform and costing document while the Conservatives have not. Spoiler: this is not your average Liberal platform. That a new leader might bring a change in Liberal priorities should have been clear enough to anyone who had the misfortune of slogging through Mark Carney’s book Values: Building a Better World for All, which I did a couple of weeks ago (the things I do

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Election 2025: The Minor Party Manifestos

Election 2025: The Minor Party Manifestos Morning all. As usual during federal elections, I devote some time to each of the party platforms before election day. Today, I am going to focus on the five parties that have absolutely no hope of forming government. Liberal and Conservative platforms will follow. In increasing order of likely seat totals: The new-and-centrist-and-made-some-kind-of- sense-when-Justin-was-running-but-harder-to-understand-now Canadian Future Party platform has a paragraph on postsecondary education. They’d like you to know they are in favour of more research.

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Innovation Without Borders: Galileo’s Networked Approach to Better Higher Education System

One of the biggest, but least remarked upon trends in European higher education in recent years is the growth of private for-profit, higher education. Even in countries where tuition is free, there are hundreds of thousands of students who now prefer to take courses at private for-profit institutions. To me, the question is, why? What sort of institutions are these anyway? Interestingly, the answer to that second question is one which might confuse my mostly North American audience. Turns out

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