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Category: Canada

Lampedusianism at the University of Waterloo

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a finance and governance experiment at Concordia. Today I want to talk about one that caught some headlines over the summer; namely, the re-organization of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Waterloo. The full details of the re-organization can be found here, but the basics of it are that where the Faculty used to have fifteen departments and two “schools”, it will now just have six schools. That sounds like a

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October 6, 2026 2 Comments

Comparative Spending Statistics

Just a short one today, based on some data from the OECD in its annual Education at a Glance Report which was released last week. I won’t do a full report, as many of the post-secondary indicators are banal and predictable (Canada does well at churning out post-secondary graduates, etc., etc.). But the report does contain one intriguing set of new tables: for the first time (AFAIK), the OECD has gathered data that, in theory at least, allow for international

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October 5, 2026 No Comments

2026 Quebec Election Manifesto Analysis

Morning everyone. We are now six days away from an election in the province of Quebec, which the polls have pegged as being an absolute nail-biter. With five parties polling above 10%, it’s conceivable that the Parti Québécois might gain an absolute majority with less than 30% of the vote. Do not skimp on the popcorn next Monday night.  Dear reader, you will be shocked to learn that post-secondary education has received virtually no attention in this election, a fact

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September 29, 2026 No Comments

Data for Internationalization

The following is adapted from a talk given at the National Association of Foreign Student Affairs (NAFSA) conference in Orlando, Florida, back in May. My thanks to Mike Alcott of ApplyBoard for the invitation to participate in the panel. There are a lot of folks in the business of moving international students from one place to another who want more data. They think more data will help them target students better by predicting changes in international student demand. But is

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September 28, 2026 No Comments

Concordia’s Quiet Revolution

Okay, so Canadian higher education is pretty cautious and risk-averse, and so perhaps the bar for calling something a ‘revolution” is pretty low. But everyone needs to take a look at what has been going on at Concordia this year, because if what has been happening there were to spread widely, I think you genuinely could call it a revolution. It’s big, bold, and has the potential to alter for the better some of the basic underpinnings of universities’ financial models. Concordia

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September 23, 2026 2 Comments
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