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Category: Canada

The Collapsing Demand for Law School

If there is one place bucking the worldwide trend of rising higher education enrolments, it’s American law schools. As the New York Times noted last week, demand for US law schools is down by something like 40% over the last two years.  The effect on enrolments hasn’t been as pronounced – excess demand meant that schools were collectively only meeting about 60% of total demand in 2010.  But inevitably, outside the very top tier, all schools are cutting admissions standards in

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February 8, 2013 No Comments

Rough Times at ST. FX

I’ve been saying for awhile now that falling government revenue and rising faculty salary expectations have made a really knock-down drag-em-out faculty strike somewhere in Canada – the kind that knocks out an entire semester – almost inevitable.  The one that started Monday at Nova Scotia’s St. Francis Xavier University may not last that long, but boy does it look ugly. Basically, the dispute appears to be as follows: Management is offering somewhere between a 6 and 7% salary increase

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January 30, 2013 No Comments

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
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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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