The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Canada

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

Read More »
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

Read More »
June 4, 2019 8 Comments

Two Important Statscan Papers

Statistics Canada released a couple of papers in the last month which unfairly got zero play in the general media, so thought I would pick them up and amplify them here. The first one, by the ever-excellent Marc Frenette, is called Do Youth From Lower- and Higher-Income Families Benefit Equally From Postsecondary Education? and it’s a pretty important question from a public policy point of view, since a good deal of the rationale for widening access is premised on the

Read More »
May 24, 2019 1 Comment

Moneyball

I was at a conference last week in Italy, much of which focused around the use of data in institutional decision-making (technically it was a conference on rankings, but increasingly rankings are being seen as a data source for institutional benchmarking and strategizing rather than as a consumer tool, so there was a lot of overlap). One of the most interesting presentations involved a lot of discussion on the sheer amount of data now available on institutional performance (which, depending

Read More »
May 14, 2019 2 Comments

Performance-Based Funding 101: Alternatives and Next Steps

Yesterday, I explained how the distribution of funds might occur in a single-envelope PBF system (that is, the dominant system in North America, where indicators generate scores for each institution which then govern the distribution of a pre-set amount of money).  And while that is the likely way a PBF system will work in Ontario, it’s not the only possible way and indeed the government has left some hints that it is thinking about an alternative method.  The way the

Read More »
April 26, 2019 No Comments
Load More

One Thought to Start Your Day

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.

Subscribe

Search Posts

Search Publications

Social Media

Linkedin Youtube Spotify

Recent Posts

More thoughts on...