The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Canada

More Money Than You Think

If there’s one thing everyone knows, it’s that Canadian universities have had a hard time of it during the recession during the last few years, yes?  Absolutely starved for income because of government cutbacks, etc etc. Not so fast.  Check out this data on university operating budgets from the CAUBO/StatsCan financial survey: Figure 1: Indexed growth in University Operating Budgets 2007-08 to 2011-12 That’s right – across the country, university budgets went up by 28% between 2007-08 and 2011-12.  That’s

Read More »
July 15, 2013 3 Comments

One Thought to Start Your 147th Year, Canada

Some of you have noted that I am a little hard on this country of ours and its higher education system(s).  That’s a fair comment: the sense of complacency around our education system and its alleged virtues does indeed drive me absolutely mental most days and I have no qualms venting about it.  (Note to our international readers: the most important thing to know about Canada is that our national dress is fleece.  Because comfort trumps pretty much everything else. 

Read More »
July 2, 2013 No Comments

The Latest Bandwagon – American Students

Over the past couple of weeks, there has been a lot of talk about US students coming to Canada.  NBC ran a segment on Americans at McGill, and the Globe and Mail ran a piece on the same.  This seems to have led many institutions to start thinking “hot damn, another market! How can we grab us some of these Americans?”   But for most institutions, this would be the wrong reaction.  Before venturing into a market, every school needs to

Read More »
June 10, 2013 2 Comments

Some Insights Into Medium-term Education Outcomes

As I noted yesterday, Canada is unnecessarily bad at looking at medium-term outcomes of education. The only place where we have data on university graduates even five years out is in BC, and they publish the data in such a weird format (seriously: check it out) that no one really explores them. It could be worse. In 2005, Statscan, did a 5-year follow-up of the class of 2000 and elected not to publish any results relating to employment or income.

Read More »
June 4, 2013 No Comments

A Better Way to Track Graduates

The real problem Canada has with respect to the whole “does-education-pay” debate is data. It’s not that we don’t have people collecting data – we do, lots of them. The problem is that they’re all collecting data over time frames so short as to be largely meaningless. The gold standard used to be the National Graduate Survey, which surveyed every fifth graduating class two and five years out. Now the 2-year survey is a year behind schedule and the 5-year

Read More »
June 3, 2013 1 Comment

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.

Subscribe

Search Posts

Search Publications

Social Media

Linkedin Youtube Spotify

Recent Posts

More thoughts on...