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Category: Canada

Concordia’s Quiet Revolution

Okay, so Canadian higher education is pretty cautious and risk-averse, and so perhaps the bar for calling something a ‘revolution” is pretty low. But everyone needs to take a look at what has been going on at Concordia this year, because if what has been happening there were to spread widely, I think you genuinely could call it a revolution. It’s big, bold, and has the potential to alter for the better some of the basic underpinnings of universities’ financial models. Concordia

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September 23, 2026 1 Comment

Associate EU Membership and Labour Mobility

Yesterday, I sketched out the likelihood of Canada joining the Erasmus program; now I wanted to address the issue of labour mobility. As a couple of news outlets breathlessly reported during the whole EU thing last week, a new agreement might allow Canadians to “live and work visa-free” in Europe (and vice-versa, although no one seemed to want to dwell on that). But how likely is this? So, we can’t know exactly until something is negotiated. But precedent is pretty

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September 22, 2026 No Comments

Erasmus for Canada? Not so Fast.

Everyone seems very excited about the prospect of Canada becoming an associate member of the European Union (even though “associate member” is not an actual thing in any EU statute, but whatever), and in particular are talking about the value of greater student mobility since apparently Prime Minister Carney would like Canada to join the EU’s Erasmus scheme. In the words of the world’s greatest living cartoonist, Aislin…”everybody take a valium”. Sure, everybody loves Erasmus in theory. Who could be

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September 21, 2026 1 Comment

Defence R&D: The Long Game

Over the past year, we at HESA towers have been thinking about how post-secondary institutions fit into Canada’s national defence, security, and sovereignty priorities, and the implications for research and skills/training. We’ve also been looking at how other countries have structured their defence R&D ecosystems and sharing some of the lessons those systems can teach Canadian institutions. We’re building on that work this year – stay tuned for an announcement on that at the end of this blog. For the

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September 16, 2026 No Comments

Bad Summer Essays

Back in the early days of this blog – lo, fifteen years ago now – I used to offer an annual award for “worst back-to-school article” in which I would excoriate whichever columnist had chosen to write something incredibly lazy, cliché-ridden and wrong. I eventually stopped giving out the award because the genre went into decline (I like to think it was because of HESA’s encouragement of data-enriched discourse) but this year, unfortunately, the bad takes have returned, albeit with

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September 15, 2026 1 Comment
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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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