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Category: Canada

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

Narcissism of Small Differences – Admissions Edition

Why do Canadian universities make admissions so complicated? A couple of years ago, for a client, I took a look at the number of different undergraduate admissions requirements there were to various universities.  What I found was that at comprehensive universities in Ontario, there tended to be no fewer that 15 separate sets of admission requirements to various programs or faculties, and at some universities it was as high as 20. Nearly all of them required grade 12 English (though

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November 8, 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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