Category: Canada

Happy 50th, CSLP (II): The Road not Taken

The Progressive Conservative Party under John Diefenbaker won a crushing majority in 1958, and his platform hadn’t contained anything with respect to education or universities.  Though he was known for his “Vision for Canada”, universities weren’t really a part of that vision.  He retained the Saint Laurent policy of paying money directly (via the AUCC) to individual universities on a more-or-less per capita basis.  The only change he made was to agree to a deal with the Duplessis government (which

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Happy 50th Birthday, Canada Student Loans Program

The Canada Student Loans Program, which over the years has helped upwards of 3 million Canadians obtain a post-secondary education, turns 50 this year.  And since the Government of Canada seems to be either too shy or too partisan (it was a Liberal creation after all) to celebrate this anniversary, I thought I’d do it here, by spending a few days giving you a bit of history about how the program came about. (Why now?  Why not August 1st, the

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Early NGS Results: The Caveats

Yesterday, I showed you some charts on graduate outcomes indicating that the kids were – mostly – alright: employment steady, Full-time employment steady, graduate incomes steady, etc.  But there are three significant reasons to be cautious about over-interpreting these results. The first is that this year’s NGS was conducted differently from previous iterations.  In previous years, the survey was conducted two years after graduation.  This year, the survey was done three years out, with graduates being interviewed in 2013 about

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Early Results from the National Graduates Survey: The Good News

Some very early National Graduates Survey (NGS) results are out, and they’re mostly good news.  The NGS – for the uninitiated – surveys university and college graduates two years after graduation.  It’s closely watched for its numbers on graduate employment, income, and debt.  Statscan has been doing this now for a little over thirty years (the first one was on the class of 1982), and since 1990 it has been conducted every five years. Usually, when Statscan does a major

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Some Final Thoughts on German Apprenticeships

If you’ve been following our Minister of Employment and Social Development, Jason Kenney, lately, you’ll know that he’s taken a keen interest in German apprenticeships.  So much so that his office recently organized a study trip to Germany, to which various provincial education ministers and Ottawa association types were also invited. There are, basically, eight major differences between our system of apprenticeships and theirs. To wit: 1)      Our apprenticeship system is post-secondary, and caters to people in their 20s.  Theirs is

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