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Category: Canada

If I were a Human Trafficker…

… I might be looking at Canadian immigration and student visa policies and thinking that there were some pretty nice loopholes to exploit. Because there are some fairly juicy ones out there. The most obvious loophole – which, in fairness, the government is already moving to close – is that student visas don’t currently require students to attend a particular institution. Hence the stories of students arriving but never attending a school, or of some Ontario institutions “stealing” visa students

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November 21, 2012 No Comments

Au Revoir, UVPs (Sayonara, Language Departments)

Marketing 101: if you’re trying to sell something, you need to have a “Unique Value Proposition,” or UVP. What is it, exactly, that your product has that no other one has? What’s the combination of quality, price, niche features, etc., that you can provide that no one else can? What’s interesting (to me at least) in the world of international higher education is how few Canadian institutions actually have a UVP, or at least one they could consciously enunciate. Usually

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November 16, 2012 6 Comments

“Mainly, it is confusing”

A colleague (and frequent reader) pointed me in the direction of a highly entertaining document about Canada’s international education pretensions. It’s an executive summary of some qualitative research (i.e., focus groups) that Ipsos-Reid conducted in Brazil, India and China on DFAIT’s behalf with respect to “Imagine Education au/in Canada”, the Canadian education “brand” which is famously unpronounceable in either language. Now, you might think that research of this nature might have informed the drafting of that report of the Advisory Panel on

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November 15, 2012 3 Comments

The Tools to Plan

Governments are really keen on planning as a way to improve access to education. “If only people would plan more,” goes the refrain, “people would be able to explore more options, make better financial decisions, etc., etc.” True as far as it goes; so why are governments themselves the biggest culprits in impeding good financial planning? Say you’re a student in grade 12 deciding where to go to school next year. You’d probably like to know how your choice of

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November 14, 2012 No Comments

Student Aid Tax Rates

Anyone who thinks taxation is overly complicated and onerous in this country needs to spend a day or two in the shoes of a student. That’s because our tax system has absolutely nothing on our student aid assessment system. Student aid in Canada is distributed based on something called “assessed need”, which is defined as “assessed costs” minus “assessed resources” (not real costs or real resources, because those are subjective). Essentially, government has to ask students about their resources and

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November 12, 2012 1 Comment

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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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