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Category: Canada

New Student Debt Data

Over the summer, Statistics Canada did a data dump on student debt from the 2015 National Graduate Survey.  I haven’t really had a chance to dive into it until now, but here’s a quick round-up. Let’s start with the proportion of students who are borrowing (see Figure 1).  Rates of borrowing vary quite a bit by level of education: lowest at the doctoral level and highest in professional programs such as law and medicine.  Neither is surprising: professional programs have

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November 5, 2020 No Comments

The Damage Done (So Far)

It’s now midnight eastern time and it’s looking more and more like we are not going to know who won the U.S. election until later today or perhaps even late this week (Pennsylvania probably will not report fully until Friday).   But it’s not too late to take a few moments to take a good look at the damage done to American higher education over the past four years, and where the system might be headed next. In some ways the

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November 4, 2020 1 Comment

Canada Christian College

There has been some brouhaha in Ontario about Canada Christian College (CCC), an evangelical school in Whitby, being given the title “university” and being “allowed to offer degrees”.  There is both less and more to this story than meets the eye.  Allow me to walk you through it. Let’s start at the beginning: when does a university become a university and who gets to grant degrees in Ontario?  Well, until 2000, you needed an Act of the Legislature.  CCC received

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November 3, 2020 No Comments

Saskatchewan/ BC Manifesto Double-Header

Y’all know I usually do a full blog on manifestos for every provincial election.  And we have two of those coming up – BC on Saturday and Saskatchewan on Monday – so it seemed natural to publish these two today and tomorrow.  But for reasons which will shortly become apparent, I decided to combine them into one.  Both elections speak to bigger issues at play that need attention. Let’s start in Saskatchewan, where the right-of-centre Saskatchewan Party (SP) looks poised

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October 21, 2020 2 Comments

Measuring Internationalization

One maddening thing about universities is that so much of what they claim to value is so badly measured.  Take internationalization.  Usually, this gets measured by the number or proportion of international students, which is ludicrously reductive given the extent to which in many countries international students are primarily income sources; occasionally, you might get some information about the number of foreign faculty.  Maybe.  But that’s it.  Anything deeper on internationalization is usually judged to be unmeasurable, so there is no way

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October 19, 2020 2 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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