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Category: Canada

Know Your Incoming Students (2019 edition)

It’s the start of the school year and that’s the best time to examine trends among incoming students. Fortunately for us, this is one of those subjects where Canada has decent public data on the subject, as the Canadian University Survey Consortium (CUSC) has been asking a (mostly) consistent set of questions to first-year students on a triennial basis since 2001. It’s not a perfect survey: consortium membership changes from cycle to cycle, so the base population is neither equal

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August 28, 2019 No Comments

Getting Caught Up

Morning all. How was the summer? Mine was pretty good and included a whistle-stop tour of the top SEC schools (short version: Ole Miss in Oxford, MS is a treasure, U Alabama in Tuscaloosa is soulless and somewhat terrifying but if for some reason you find yourself there, eat at Dreamland BBQ). Here at HESA Towers our team of nine (!) is getting ready for a massive semester.  Tomorrow we release our second annual State of Post-Secondary Education in Canada (and yes,

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August 26, 2019 No Comments

Counting Foreign Students

An American colleague of mine sent me a note the other day.  “So…Canada is heading to a million foreign students? That’s huge!”  To which my reaction was: “Wut?  Dude, it’s about a quarter of that.” At which point my colleague emailed me a recent story from ThePIE, a nifty little London-based outlet which covers international education.  It was called Will Canada have quadrupled its student numbers in eight years? by Dave Sage, who appears to be some kind of immigration and education

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June 14, 2019 1 Comment

The Affordability Thing

Very few things in higher education drive me quite as spare as the focus on “affordability” in higher education.  First of all, no one defines it properly.  When most people talk about affordability, they are using it as a synonym for price.  But this is nonsense because affordability is a ratio: price divided by ability to pay.  What is affordable for someone in Westmount or Tuxedo or North Van is quite different from what is affordable to someone from Verdun

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June 12, 2019 2 Comments

Trudeau vs. Harper

As we move inexorably towards a fall election (21 October, in case you’d forgotten), it is time to try to evaluate how well the present government has done on skills, science and higher education and how its record stacks up against its main competitor, the Conservative Party.  We obviously can’t do a manifesto analysis now because the Conservatives don’t have a manifesto yet (though frankly, this recent set of policy speeches by Andrew Scheer are less than encouraging).  However, while

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June 4, 2019 8 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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