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Category: Canada

Deans and Multiple Personality Disorders

Imagine two scenarios.  In the first, an academic is threatened with termination if he/she speaks out publicly against the university’s proposed strategic plan.  In the second, a manager is fired for disobeying a direct order from a superior about running down the company he/she works for.  For most readers, I’d guess the first scenario is abhorrent, and the second quite understandable (if perhaps somewhat harsh).  Yet both scenarios describe precisely what happened to University of Saskatchewan’s Dean, Robert Buckingham. The

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May 16, 2014 12 Comments

Trends in Applications

Some interesting trend data to review from Ontario today. First, there’s the fact that applications from secondary schools have dropped by 3% this year, from 92,892 to 89,609 (as of the February snapshot, which for most purposes is as good as the final numbers, since something like 95% of all applicants apply before the end-of-January line).  This is a moderately big deal since it’s the first time since the double cohort that numbers have fallen. Figure 1: Applications from Secondary

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May 14, 2014 No Comments

Why (Almost) Everyone Loves International Students (Part 2)

Yesterday, I showed how good international students were for universities’ bottom lines.  But it’s not quite as simple as I made it out to be.  Whether admitting international students makes sense or not depends on four factors: 1)      How much of the income do you get to keep?  In Quebec, international students in “regulated” programs (which include Arts) are worth essentially nothing to institutions because the government claws it all back.  On the other hand, in block-grant provinces (and in Saskatchewan,

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May 8, 2014 5 Comments

Why Everyone Loves International Students (Part 1)

A nice simple post today: why universities are going bananas for international students. The first figure shows undergraduate tuition fees for international students in each province.  They range from a little under $10,000 in Newfoundland, to just over $25,000 in PEI.  The national average for this period is $18,840; in Ontario it is $23,000. International Undergraduate Tuition Fees by Province, 2012, in $2013               What’s more, fees for international students have been going up

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May 7, 2014 5 Comments

Mobility Responsibilities

Saying that we should remove barriers to student mobility sounds like a motherhood issue.  But scratch a little deeper, and you’ll see that, in fact, Canadians are pretty equivocal on the concept. For starters, while everyone loves inbound mobility (come here!  It’s a great place!), there’s a pretty deep streak of protectionism in Canadian provincial governments on the issue of outbound mobility.  The sentiment of “let’s keep our kids at home” runs deep in many parts of the country.  It wasn’t until the advent

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April 28, 2014 2 Comments
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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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