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Category: Canada

UBC Expanding

A couple of weeks ago, the University of British Columbia issued a press release, which read: The University of British Columbia is expanding its presence south of the Fraser River with the $70-million purchase of a property in Surrey. Whoo!  Big bucks!  Can’t go wrong buying property in the Lower Mainland, right?  Seems like this could just be a good long-term financial play. I mean, why tie up your investments entirely in equities when property is so hot?          UBC

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November 22, 2021 7 Comments

Overqualification

Sorry for the late blog appearance: I’ve been bouncing around Alberta and British Columbia for work and play this week (#ICETECA, baby) and it’s tough to write on these terrible little short-haul flights.  Anyways, today I want to talk about a paper which came out a few weeks ago called Overqualification among 2012 and 2013 bachelor’s graduates, by Statistics Canada’s Diane Galarneau.  “Overqualification” is a fraught topic to define and measure.  This study uses a snapshot of bachelor’s graduates a couple

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November 18, 2021 2 Comments

Bring Back the Transparency Debate

In 1991, Maclean’s began publishing university rankings.  In doing so, it relied heavily on university co-operation: in particular, it required institutions to fill in a survey for various pieces of data on admissions, class sizes, etc.  Not all the questions were particularly well-defined and so there was a lot of data gaming.  Eventually, in 2006, the universities decided they were not going to play the game any more: they were going to get out of the rankings business and instead set up

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November 15, 2021 1 Comment

Affordability, 2021

StatsCan released its annual survey of tuition fees at universities last month (it does not bother to collect similar data with colleges, because reasons).  Average domestic undergraduate fees looked like this: Figure 1: Average Undergraduate Tuition, by Province, 2021-22 Only two things to note here.  First, Ontario fees keep falling relative to other provinces because of the Ford government’s freeze on tuition (for which, hilariously, it continues to receive no political credit). For most of the past decade, Ontario was

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November 1, 2021 1 Comment

Non-existent Preconditions for DARPA Success

The federal government is taking its sweet time being sworn in (apparently the GG is on holiday in Germany or something), so it’ll be another week or so before we get new ministers and new mandate letters.  These letters set ministers’ priorities in a more formal way than manifesto commitments.  My absolute dearest wish, when it comes to Science and Innovation, is that these letters should read “you should take our mandate commitments seriously but not literally”.  That is, the

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October 13, 2021 1 Comment

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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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