Category: Canada

Defence R&D: The Long Game

Over the past year, we at HESA towers have been thinking about how post-secondary institutions fit into Canada’s national defence, security, and sovereignty priorities, and the implications for research and skills/training. We’ve also been looking at how other countries have structured their defence R&D ecosystems and sharing some of the lessons those systems can teach Canadian institutions. We’re building on that work this year – stay tuned for an announcement on that at the end of this blog. For the

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Bad Summer Essays

Back in the early days of this blog – lo, fifteen years ago now – I used to offer an annual award for “worst back-to-school article” in which I would excoriate whichever columnist had chosen to write something incredibly lazy, cliché-ridden and wrong. I eventually stopped giving out the award because the genre went into decline (I like to think it was because of HESA’s encouragement of data-enriched discourse) but this year, unfortunately, the bad takes have returned, albeit with

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The Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s Crap H-Index Paper

Today I want to focus on a publication which came out from the Macdonald-Laurier Institute called   “The equity excellence trade-off: A study of EDI in the Canada Research Chairs programs” which appeared on September 1, 2026. I have already commented on the document on social media, calling it “the worst piece of social science I have seen in a long time”. But I thought those of you who don’t follow me on Bluesky might be interested in a critique as

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The State of Post-Secondary Education in Canada, 2026

Morning all. The State of Post-Secondary Education in Canada 2026 is out today, and you can download it here. Sincere thanks to our partners at Studiosity, Riipen, Pearson, Duolingo, Intellectual Property Ontario and Westcliff University for helping to produce this year’s version and keep it free for everyone to use. Anything you want to know about Canadian post-secondary education should be in here – but if it’s not, email us and tell us what you think we should add next

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Back to School 2026

Welcome back everyone. It’s the Tuesday after Labour Day, and that means it’s time to start Blog Year 16 (gulp) with a look ahead over the next ten months or so. I’m looking at three very big themes. Let’s start with the one big piece of news over the summer that has the potential to overwhelm pretty much everyone: the release of the Report on Campus Antisemitism and Student Experiences. It’s not the world’s most sophisticated piece of analysis –

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