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Category: Canada

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

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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.

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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

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June 3, 2013 1 Comment

The Economics of Merit Scholarships

There is a wonderful moment in Philip Delves Broughton’s Ahead of the Curve in which he describes a fight between a student and an administrator at Harvard Business School.  During the altercation, the student asks why he is being jerked-around, since, after all, he is “the customer”.  To this, the administrator calmly replies: “no you’re not, you’re the product”. For serious institutions, this is exactly right.  People judge a school based on its alumni and their accomplishments.  Students are just inputs in

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May 30, 2013 No Comments

The End of CREPUQ and its Implications

So, the Conseil des Recteurs et Principaux des Universites du Quebec (CREPUQ) died this week, after the number of institutions pulling-out of the alliance rose to eleven. The basics of the dispute are simple.  The big research universities are starving for cash; they’d prefer to get it from tuition fees if they can (students are a more dependable source of income than flighty governments), but they’ll take it via the funding formula if they have to.  From the Laval/Montreal perspective:

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May 3, 2013 No 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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