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Category: Canada

Memo to Minister Nicolaides

To: Demetrios Nicolaides, Minister of Advanced Education, Alberta From: That guy from HESA Towers Dear Minister, So, you have finally got to the end of the Alberta 2030 Process.  Congratulations!  The question now is: where do you go from here? When the UCP came to power, it had two fundamental aims with respect to higher education: reduce government expenditures to fit the province’s new post-oil-bust financial circumstances and make institutions more active partners in the province’s economic development.  Both were entirely

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January 21, 2021 No Comments

Getting A Head Start on the Next Tech Panic

One of the things that makes the “tech” industry in Canada is that it is basically not a tech industry at all.  If you look at the major publicly-traded companies in Canada which could reasonably be described as “tech”, what you see is mostly a collection of e-commerce platforms plus some enterprise software companies.  We have a few equipment makers (Sierra Wireless, Evertz, Photon) whose annual revenues combined are smaller than York University’s budget.  And there’s Ballard, which is in

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January 12, 2021 No Comments

Whales

One of the weirdest thing about Canadian tech policy (insofar as we have one) is the obsession with Canadian “champions”.   Whenever a promising company – say Verafin, or Element AI – gets sold to a foreign (mainly American) buyer, there is always much wailing and gnashing of teeth about Canada being “unable to compete”.    The idea seems to be that unless we have big behemoth players striding the globe, we are not a serious tech country.  It’s not entirely clear why competitiveness should

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January 6, 2021 3 Comments

Best Higher Ed Books of 2020

Around this time of year, I always do a “Higher Ed Books of the Year” (usual caveat: these are books I happened to read in a year, not books which appeared in a year, though obviously there is some overlap).  This year, I did a mid-year “Best Books” in June, so today’s post will focus on my reading over the last six months but end with a books of the year countdown including all twelve months.  (If you’re interested, I have my

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December 9, 2020 1 Comment

Ontario’s PBF System: Odds, Ends and Contradictions

Yesterday, we looked at some of the math behind Ontario’s new funding system, and how a system which is allegedly “60% performance-based funding” will at most result in about $15 million, or 0.4%, of funding re-allocated in some way.  But there are still more oddities to explore. One of my favourite foibles about this funding system is how it seems to have been constructed one element at a time, with no overall strategic intent.  For instance: the main goal of the enrolment-based

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December 3, 2020 4 Comments

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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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