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Category: Canada

This Should Be Interesting

So, I see that the Government of Canada is going to have-a-go at designating Canadian institutions for their suitability to accept foreign students, and deny entry visas to students who wish to study at non-designated institutions.  Having watched this process unfold in the student loans arena for the past twenty years, or so, I can only say, “good luck with that”. Designation isn’t a new thing in Ottawa.  The HRDC spent the better part of a decade trying to get a

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January 29, 2013 No Comments

The Uselessness of Automatic Entrance Scholarships

A couple of weeks ago, HEQCO released The Impact of Scholarships and Bursaries on Persistence and Academic Success in University, in which Martin Dooley, Abigail Payne, and Leslie Robb examined the effects of university merit scholarships in terms of grades, persistence, and degree completion.  The paper’s technical analysis was excellent, but the policy analysis wasn’t as sharp as it could have been. Most scholarships these days can be described as “automatic” awards – if you have an 80% average in high school,

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January 25, 2013 2 Comments

Why Don’t we Have More Private Higher Education?

Here’s a puzzle:  In many provinces, the law allows for the establishment of new, private, degree-granting institutions.  So why don’t they do it? Why don’t disaffected lawyers set up a cut-price law school in central Toronto to compete against the expensive products offered by U of T and Osgoode?   Why doesn’t a brand-name private secondary institution, like the Bishop Strachan School, create its own liberal arts college, a la Bryn Mawr or Wellesley? In Canada, private higher education is often thought

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January 16, 2013 1 Comment

Those “Lost Generation” Stories

I see Maclean’s is cashing in on the zeitgeist with yet another story about a “lost generation“.  These stories always cover the same arc: Find a young, bright, hardworking, recent graduate whose career, for one reason or another, hasn’t hit lift off; blame this situation on the recession, even though that link can’t really be proven; provide some cod-economic arguments as to why this state of affairs is permanent; repeat. But we should know it’s not true, because we’ve seen

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January 15, 2013 1 Comment

Those Big, Bad, “American-style” Program Reviews

Hi everyone, and welcome back. The best education story of the winter break was almost certainly the Globe piece on program reviews at Canadian universities.  Despite an inane headline (when it comes to a policy’s unsuitability, nothing unites Canadian bien-pensants more than claims to an American origin), it’s an important piece about a useful process occurring at universities across Canada. HESA has directly contributed to two of these exercises (you can see some of our work, here), and with that experience I think

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January 7, 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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