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Category: Canada

Spousal Income

Over the past decade, successive Canadian governments have tried to give bigger and bigger breaks to parents through the student aid system. Loan eligibility has steadily been widened to richer and richer families by making expected parental contributions less onerous. But for some reason, no recent government has seen fit to change spousal contribution rates. Since the mid-1990s, this rate has been set at 80% of the spouse’s combined net income over a threshold which varies a bit by province

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November 7, 2012 No Comments

Australia is Better than Canada

…at least as far as thinking through the implications of globalization on education.   And I’m not talking just about the trivial matter of attracting more students to study at their universities. About a week ago, the Australian government released a forward-looking White Paper called Australia in the Asian Century which charted a set of strategies to improve Australia’s chances of benefiting from the continuing Asian economic boom.  Some of those strategies were education-related; one was to get ten Australian universities into the world’s

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November 6, 2012 4 Comments

Re-thinking “First-Generation” Students

Back when the McGuinty government was still working out what it wanted to do in higher education, it made a commitment about making progress in access for four key groups: aboriginal students, students with disabilities, francophone students and “first-generation” students. Two of these were unquestionably sensible. Anything that helps Aboriginal students is a Good Thing. Of course, there are some enormous differences in the barriers faced by, say, Aboriginal students from Toronto and people from fly-in First Nations communities that

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November 2, 2012 2 Comments

Non-solutions in search of a problem

I thought the Globe’s recent Our Time to Lead series was pretty good. The high point, pretty obviously, was Erin Anderssen’s kick-off piece and the low-point, equally obviously, was Don Tapscott’s context-free piece of techno-fetishist weirdness. On the whole, it was a good sign for what seems to be an increase in coverage on educational issues. However, I do feel the Globe slipped a bit with its very final article; namely, a policy prescription for a “national strategy” for students. I

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November 1, 2012 3 Comments

Canada’s Bologna Challenge

It may not be obvious why Canada needs to think much about Bologna – we already have a common higher education area, right? – but the fact is that we do. Partly, it’s a matter of long-term market-protection; as time goes on and elements of the Bologna approach becomes more common around the world (experiments with Bologna-like structures are occurring on more or less every continent, and even in the United States), institutions wishing to attract foreign students may eventually

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October 25, 2012 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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