The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Canada

British Columbia in a Nutshell (2026)

Morning all. A few years ago, I did a series of pieces on provincial higher education systems (for example, back here). I thought I would return to these five or so years later to see what has changed.  I’ll be running these periodically over the next eight months or so, but I thought I would start today with BC – where there is a provincial election in a few days’ time – and head east from there. So, British Columbia.

Read More »
October 14, 2026 No Comments

The Contemptible OSAP Cover-Up

If you have been paying only casual attention to the Ontario Student Assistance file over the past few months and seen headlines like this one from July, where the province suspended several private colleges from the program, and this one from last week, where the province sicced the Ontario Provincial Police on unnamed private colleges and suspended all private institutions from receiving OSAP funding, you might be under the impression that the Ontario government is very serious about protecting the

Read More »
October 13, 2026 No Comments

Why Ottawa Can’t Do the Knowledge Economy

I have read two very interesting things in the past couple of weeks. One is Justin Ling’s excellent piece in the Toronto Star about the inner workings of the Carney PMO and what the government thinks it’s accomplishing (tl;dr: as efficient and business-like as the new PMO is, it isn’t actually trying to fix what’s broken in Ottawa because it often doesn’t know what the actual problem is). And the second is Jeffrey Ding’s excellent new book Technology and the

Read More »
October 7, 2026 No Comments

Lampedusianism at the University of Waterloo

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a finance and governance experiment at Concordia. Today I want to talk about one that caught some headlines over the summer; namely, the re-organization of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Waterloo. The full details of the re-organization can be found here, but the basics of it are that where the Faculty used to have fifteen departments and two “schools”, it will now just have six schools. That sounds like a

Read More »
October 6, 2026 1 Comment

Comparative Spending Statistics

Just a short one today, based on some data from the OECD in its annual Education at a Glance Report which was released last week. I won’t do a full report, as many of the post-secondary indicators are banal and predictable (Canada does well at churning out post-secondary graduates, etc., etc.). But the report does contain one intriguing set of new tables: for the first time (AFAIK), the OECD has gathered data that, in theory at least, allow for international

Read More »
October 5, 2026 No Comments
Load More

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.

Subscribe

Search Posts

Search Publications

Social Media

Linkedin Youtube Spotify

Recent Posts

More thoughts on...