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Category: Canada

Oh for Heaven’s Sake (Western Canadian Edition)

You may have seen some reporting recently – say, here, here and here – to the effect that I’ve authored a report saying that the intellectual centre of gravity in Canada is moving westward at a rapid rate. You may also have seen me quoted saying things to the effect that it’s a result of sustained funding increases over the past decade in the west, while in Ontario even the major increases seen in McGuinty’s first term were barely able to

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October 26, 2011 No Comments

Maslow v. Durkheim in the Canadian University Report

For those of you interested in student ratings of Canadian universities, the Globe and Mail’s Canadian University Report – for which we at HESA do the data work – is out today. I’m not going to recount all the gory details here – they’re available both in the magazine which accompanies today’s paper and online. What I’m going to do instead is outline briefly how the data can be used not just to compare institutions but to answer more profound

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October 25, 2011 2 Comments

Why are Toronto Students so Friggin’ Miserable? (Part Two)

Today we revisit the issue of why student dissatisfaction in Canada seems to be concentrated in Toronto, aka the Centre of the Universe. We’ll try to answer the simple question – do Toronto schools fare poorly because a disproportionate number of Toronto students live in their parents’ basements? Our data source today is the HESA-administered survey that fuels the satisfaction results in The Globe and Mail’s Canadian University Report, in which students are asked to express satisfaction on a scale

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October 21, 2011 No Comments

Ducking the Issue

Man, did last week’s Globe editorial on reforming higher education get the bien pensants’ knickers in a knot, or what? Constance Adamson of OCUFA took the predictable “everything would be fine if only there was more money” line. Over at Maclean’s, Todd Pettigrew made a passionate defence of research and teaching being inextricably entwined, largely echoing a piece from the previous week by McGill’s Stephen Saideman, who argued that universities aren’t teaching vs. research but teaching and research. Methinks some

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October 19, 2011 1 Comment

Well, That Was Interesting

The Report of the Expert Panel on R&D, that is. It’s an intriguing and well-written piece of work (kudos to Peter Nicholson), at least as much for what it doesn’t say as what it does. There are three things this report does extremely well: i) it explains the mind-boggling number of tiny programs the federal government supports, ii) it graphically shows how the Scientific Research and Experimental Development program massively overshadows all other panels combined and iiI), it amusingly tells

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October 18, 2011 No 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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