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Category: Canada

The New Normal

Happy New Year!  Did everyone have a great vacation? The highlight of my vacation was going to Argentina and stumbling upon the world’s most unfortunately-named university in a suburb of Buenos Aires, named “Morón”.  It’s called – wait for it – Unversidad de Morón.  Seriously, their international marketing people must have the most difficult jobs in higher ed. Anyhow, I wanted to start the year by talking about what was a hopeful development from last fall – the Government of New Brunswick’s

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January 6, 2014 3 Comments

Things We Take for Granted in Student Assistance

Last week, I had the pleasure of talking with federal and provincial student aid leaders, in Toronto, about global developments in student assistance.  I told them there were a lot of interesting developments in different places, but they weren’t necessarily applicable to Canada because of different national contexts. Context matters in student assistance – not everything we have here is available to student aid types elsewhere.  Here, for instance, are just a few of the things we take for granted

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December 3, 2013 No Comments

Unorthodox Dropout Statistics

Every once in awhile, some policy-maker or journalist gets their knickers in a twist about dropout rates.  And whenever that happens, people start looking for data.  Which, in this case, basically doesn’t exist. Institutions have their own non-completion data, but since lots of people switch institutions for one reason or another a non-complete doesn’t equal a “dropout”.  Our national unit-record system – Statistics Canada’s Post-Secondary Student Information System – is supposed to be able to solve this precise problem, but

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November 29, 2013 11 Comments

Some Free Advice for the Parti Quebecois

So I see that the Government of Quebec, far from hitting their zero deficit target this year, is in fact going to come in with a deficit of about $2.5 billion.  This means that, not only will the “reinvestment” in higher education – the money that was going to compensate institutions for not getting their promised tuition increase – not come any time soon, but it’s better than even-money that there’ll be cuts this year instead. Two points: 1)      Hey, CREPUQ! 

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November 28, 2013 No Comments

Canada’s Bologna Moment

If you can cast your mind back all of three weeks, before the Ford video(s) and Mike Duffy going kamikaze on the Prime Minister, there was some big news out of Ottawa about how a Canada-Europe Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement (CETA) had finally been reached. The finer details of the deal are still unavailable, but one thing that has been promised all along is that this deal will permit the free movement of labour between Canada and Europe.  And that’s

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November 14, 2013 No Comments

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.

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