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Category: Canada

For and Against Differentiation

I have had a few interesting chats over the past couple of months about the issue of institutional differentiation and its desirability. You will recall perhaps that I spoke favourably about it back in the fall as a means of bringing greater focus to institutional strategy. From these conversations, I have come to understand the need to be clearer about how one is defining the term “differentiation,” because it has two different possible meanings. Most often, I find that people

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February 10, 2025 4 Comments

Student Aid in Canada: The Long View

Note: this is a short version of a paper which has just appeared in issue 72:4 the Canadian Tax Journal. How short? I’m trying for under 1000 words. Let’s see how I do. Canadian student aid programs existed in scattered forms since just after World War I but became a “national program” when the Dominion-Canadian Student Aid Program (DCSAP) was created in 1939. Under this program, the Government of Canada provided block cash grants to provinces who administered their own

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February 4, 2025 No Comments

Representing Students: Crisis Edition

The three of us are ex-student leaders. And we’ve been thinking a bit lately about how student leaders can meet the present moment in higher education. One of us vividly remembers the meeting which formalized the creation of the Canadian Alliance of Student Associations (CASA) thirty years ago this week in Fredericton, New Brunswick (you can easily guess which of us it was because the other two weren’t born yet). To a significant extent, CASA defined itself in opposition to

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January 29, 2025 3 Comments

Taking Donald Trump Seriously and What it Means for Canadian Higher Education

If there is a unifying element to Canada, it is a desire not to be American. Sometimes, this leads us down some pretty juvenile pathways; for instance, the impossibility of having serious discussions about health care because anyone against the clearly inadequate status quo simply must be in favour of “American-style private care.” But sometimes, like right now, this unity is a pretty handy political asset. A maniac is in possession of our southern border. He wants something from us. It’s not trade

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January 28, 2025 5 Comments

Les Quinze Glorieuses: Understanding the History of Québec Universities (Part 3)

(There is no point in you reading today’s piece if you missed Monday’s and Tuesday’s installments on the history of Québec Universities. Catch up on Part 1 and Part 2.) After the original four campuses of the UQ network—Montreal, Trois-Rivieres, Chicoutimi and ENAP e system—opened in 1968, the UQ system continued to grow at a healthy clip. The Rimouski campus opened in 1969. Abitibi-Témiscamingue and Hull got “centres d’études universitaires,” which didn’t end up becoming universities until the early 1980s

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January 22, 2025 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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