So. This is the last blog of the academic year. Service resumes Tuesday, 2 September. It’s been a long year. I’m pretty tired. How about you? This was the year it all kind of came crashing down: not just here in Canda, but everywhere else too. It’s too long to go through and my more faithful readers already know the story. It’s not just in Canada. In France, Australia, and the UK, we saw institutions having similar problems: all these
One of the most tiresome debates in post-secondary education is about whether or not students emerge from their studies “job ready”. To which the answer, of course, is that for the most part they do not. Education – including vocational education – is meant to prepare you for a long career rather than an immediate job. Training for specific jobs? That’s usually a job for companies themselves, and the fact that they underinvest in this area – notably by cutting
There is no aspect of university autonomy that is more fundamental – in the British Commonwealth at least — than the right of each institution to select which students it chooses to admit. Along with financial autonomy, staffing autonomy, and financial autonomy (that last one being under increasing pressure these days), the right of institutions to choose which students to teach is fundamental to the Canadian higher education system. At no time in Canadian history has a government ever tried
It was a busy week in Parliament last week. The King came to Ottawa to deliver a Speech From the Throne. His speech – almost exclusively a re-hash of Liberal promises from the April election – was deeply depressing for anyone who thinks the words “knowledge economy” have any meaning. The main feature of the Speech from the Throne was that it spelled out, in excruciating detail, how the Liberals intend to double down on re-creating the Canadian economy
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
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.
