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Category: Canada

Really? You Think? (PBO’s Supercluster Critique)

On Tuesday, the Parliamentary Budget Office released a sharply critical paper concerning the federal government’s Superclusters project, basically saying, that a) the projects are behind schedule and b) most of the numbers used to justify the project in terms of net benefits and new jobs were utter nonsense. It’s actually not that interesting a report.  Once you take out the executive summary and the references it’s six pages long with a lot of white space.  The broad strokes of the criticism are nothing new

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October 8, 2020 1 Comment

Student Loans and Income Tax Systems

Last week, I blogged about my disappointment with the Throne Speech.  However, I left out one really promising thing; namely, the idea that it would make possible free, automatic tax filing for simple returns to ensure citizens receive the benefits they need.  This is good, but in some ways insufficiently ambitions.  They should go further and fully modernize the system to make possible the collection of loans through the income tax system and thus make possible a more fully income-contingent loan

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October 5, 2020 3 Comments

Needed Research on Remote Teaching

We’re only a few weeks into the term, but there are two important phenomena going on that, in a sensible world, would be the subject of urgent inquiry by all Canadian institutions. (This is not, of course, a sensible world, but I’ll get back to that at the end of the blog). The first topic is: why exactly have so many international students enrolled for remote teaching this term?  We don’t have full numbers yet, and probably won’t for awhile, but

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October 1, 2020 2 Comments

The Throne Speech and Why We’re in Deep Trouble

Last week, the Governor-General delivered the Speech From the Throne (SFT). I argue it is a very ominous document for post-secondary education.  Since March, the Government of Canada has spent about $250 billion on various types of direct and indirect support for Canadians.  Very roughly, a third of that went to the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB), other third went to the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy (CEWS), and the balance went through three or four dozen targeted programs, among the largest of which

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September 30, 2020 No Comments

What do Strategic Plans Actually Say?

Today’s post is co-authored by Alex Usher and Michael Savage Yesterday’s blog focused on the structure of strategic plans, asking whether they are built from the mission statement backwards or from upwards from a checklist of ideas people had without looking at the overall picture?  (answer: for the most part they are built from checklists and hence are not particularly strategic, though they as planning documents they may work perfectly fine).  Today we’re going to dig into the substance of

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September 29, 2020 5 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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