Canada is – to put it mildly – flat-out terrible at releasing student aid data. How many loans are issued? How many grants? In what amounts? These rather basic facts are unknowable from the public record. The government of Canada publishes statistics on the Canada Student Loans Program, which is good except that a) that’s only about 40% of the system and b) the most recent publication is from – and I wish I were kidding about this – 2016-17.
As you may recall, I was involved in trying to launch a pan-Canadian effort to improve digital resources at Canadian universities, especially for those courses that looked like being biggest potential pedagogical nightmares (i.e. large first-year survey classes). I am very pleased that this effort has taken wing with some funding from the McConnell Foundation and direction from my friend David Graham. Last I checked, it had over fifteen institutions participating in some way. The focus of the effort has changed a bit
So, you may have seen on the weekend that the Alberta Government decided to award a $3.7 million contract to McKinsey & Company to conduct a review of the province’s post-secondary system. I have thoughts. The details of the contract are unavailable, but you can see the initial request for proposals here. It’s actually a pretty cool set of research projects that might produce some interesting data. I mean, admittedly they are things you’d expect your public service to mostly have
Next term is going to be awful in pretty much every way imaginable. But it could be worse. Most obviously, it would be worse if a remote fall term is not a one-off. It’s possible the virus will not be contained sufficiently for a resumption of face-to-face classes or international travel by January. We could be looking at a full year of this, in which case i) many will wish they spent more time working on better online delivery over the summer, ii)
I mentioned a couple of weeks ago how the financial position of US universities during the pandemic was going to be absolutely shattered. In the public sector, that’s because states can’t deficit finance and so a declining tax base translates directly into lower public revenues for institutions; in the private sector it’s because there’s a real question about whether any students are going to pay $40K+ for an online semester. The Chronicle of Higher Education is keeping track of the layoffs at US
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