The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Canada

Women in Engineering

Back around 1990, women signing up to be Engineers was a political statement.  Because of Polytechnique.  Because of the Fourteen.  It felt like a surge at the time, but maybe it was just Engineering-inclined students doing what they would have done anyway, only putting a political sheen on the choice.  Regardless, if you’d told anyone in the early 90s if enrolments in Engineering faculties would still be run running 4- or 5-to-1 male to female thirty years in the future,

Read More »
December 6, 2023 No Comments

Canada’s First National Minister of Higher Education

Last Friday’s, Marc Miller, the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Canadian Citizenship (IRCC), announced three changes to the International Student Visa program (link here).  You may have seen a small news alert about it (see here or here).  But it seems that almost nobody caught the full import of the announcement.  The announcement started out ok, with Miller again swatting down rumours of a cap on international student visas and comparing the idea to “performing surgery with a hammer”.  Miller

Read More »
October 31, 2023 2 Comments

Follow up on Quebec

If you just gauge public sentiment by twitter, it would seem the that CAQ’s policies on international and out-of-province students announced last Friday have a lot of support.  Certainly, someone was quick to put together a few infographics – highly inaccurate ones, to be sure – for use as memes.  But usually the arguments were phrased in terms of whatabbouteries: how expensive programs in Ontario were (usually based on cherry-picking the costs at, say, U of T Law and pretending

Read More »
October 19, 2023 7 Comments

Canada’s Internationalization Strategy

A couple of months ago, I was invited to participate in a Global Affairs Canada (GAC) stakeholder roundtable on its Strategic Plan for the next five years.  It was very kind of them to invite me and a few others to be part of the consultation.  It was an interesting window into how the federal government thinks about policy and – especially – strategy. It seems to me that GAC is in the education business for three reasons. But instead

Read More »
October 11, 2023 2 Comments

Long-Term OECD Data on Institutional Financing

Just for fun, I went prowling through some back issues of OECD’s Education at a Glance (as one does), to look up how public financing of tertiary education has changed over time.  OECD specifically says you shouldn’t do this, which I see as an admission that they view the data submitted by national governments as either not particularly reliable or at least compiled by different people using different definitions/standards on an annual basis.   Having looked over the data, I can

Read More »
October 10, 2023 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.

Subscribe

Search Posts

Search Publications

Social Media

Linkedin Youtube Spotify

Recent Posts

More thoughts on...