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Category: Canada

You Couldn’t Make It Up

This email is G-rated, so I can’t use the full range of sexual/scatological imagery needed to describe my true feelings about the Ontario government’s Tuition Rebate announcement last week. I’ll keep it to: I told you so. To recap, the Ontario Liberals made a not-particularly sensible election promise to give a 30% rebate tuition to full-time dependent students. But at least it involved giving some new money to low-income students, even if it came at the cost of providing a

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January 9, 2012 9 Comments

A Harper-ized Canada Student Loans Program

I rarely say this about a Jane Taber article, but her Christmas Eve piece on Prime Minister Harper’s stewarding of federal-provincial relations was mildly fascinating. Her thesis is that Harper is gradually starting to impose his vision of water-tight federalism and has a long-term plan to get the federal government to back off and let provinces get on with doing whatever they are supposed to do under Article 92 of the Constitution. So, what’s the impact on higher education? I

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January 4, 2012 1 Comment

Affordable Enough?

“Everybody knows” that student debt loads are spiralling out of control, that the incidence of debt is growing at an alarming rate and that debt loads are unsustainable. Student debt forgiveness has played a major role in the Occupy movement in the United States, where student debt doubled in the last decade and now exceeds credit card debt. If reports are to be believed, we are in the midst of a student loan crisis. Scratch the surface a little and you’ll

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December 15, 2011 No Comments

Comparing Support for the Social Sciences and Humanities

After writing about SSHRC a couple of weeks ago one very loyal reader requested that I elaborate on the point that the social sciences and humanities are treated well in Canada compared to other countries. I’m a sucker for loyal readers, so: I’ll say straight off that that comparing national granting council budgets is tricky because there are some significant structural differences in the way research gets funded in different countries (i.e., not all funding goes through granting councils). When

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December 12, 2011 No Comments

Miserable Toronto Students: Cutting to the Chase

Loyal readers will know we’ve been studying why Toronto students are so miserable for some time now. But we think we’ve found the jackpot here. Up until now, we’ve mostly been looking at common institutional factors that seem to result in lower satisfaction levels. But it’s time to take a really good look at Toronto students themselves. Could it be that they’re just more demanding/prone to complain/ likely to kvetch? In a word, are they just more crotchety than students

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December 9, 2011 3 Comments

One Thought to Start Your Day

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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