Category: Canada

Ontario in a Nutshell

All righty then: so far in this nutshell series we’ve avoided writing about the two “big” provinces, but since Ontario is going to the polls this week, we thought it made sense to tackle that province today, before we get to the manifesto.  Let’s start with student numbers.  You need to remember that Ontario is big.  Where post-secondary numbers are concerned, it has an even bigger footprint than it does in terms of physical size or population.  43% of all university

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The Alberta Exodus

A few months ago I wrote a piece on inter-provincial mobility in Canada in which I a) noted that in absolute terms, Alberta was the country’s largest net-exporter of students and b) this was a big change from 15 years ago when it was one of the larger net-importers.  When I pointed this out, I had a number of people on Twitter make assumptions about the deterioration of prospects for young Albertans, particularly after the collapse of the oil industry/arrival

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New Brunswick in a Nutshell

Morning everyone.  Today’s edition of the Nutshell series features one of the more anomalous provinces in Canada (from a higher education perspective, at least), the one whose beaches Le Monde once referred to as “Canada’s Riviera”: New Brunswick! New Brunswick’s anomalous status is mostly centered around the issue of enrolment: it is the only province in Confederation that has seen effectively no growth over the past two decades.  This is not to say that there have been no changes –

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Manitoba in a Nutshell

Good morning. We’ve done “nutshell” portraits of Nova Scotia, Alberta and British Columbia.   Now, on to the greatest province of them all, the only one that shot its way into Confederation, Manitoba. Let’s start with student numbers.  Manitoba has seen slow but steady growth on the university side, with numbers growing from 25,000 to 40,000 between 2001 and 2020  With colleges, it is hard to be exact about growth rates since a substantial portion of the increase shown here was in fact due to changing Statistics Canada

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Northern Post-secondary Education

Though it passed mostly un-noticed south of 60, the Task Force on Northern Post-Secondary Education issued its final report at the end of March.  It’s worth taking a bit of time to examine and reflect on what it says. Most of the report is concerned with the documentation of barriers to the growth of higher education in the North, as recounted through public consultations and a literature review.  And these challenges are substantial: the K-12 pipeline is much weaker than

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