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Category: Canada

New Brunswick Manifesto Analysis

Once upon a time, back when Frank McKenna’s was premier, New Brunswick was seen as something of a leader in Canadian public policy.  Balancing budgets, championing official languages, investing in telecommunications and the internet, creating jobs (even if a lot of them were in call centres) – New Brunswick was seen as having understood the nature of the Maritimes’ long-term challenges and moved decisively to address them. It has been awhile since anyone thought of New Brunswick as a policy

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September 24, 2018 No Comments

History of Canadian PSE Part II (to 1940)

If you look at the history of Canadian post-secondary education, there are two particularly notable things going on with respect to the first four decades of the twentieth century.  The first is that western Canada got universities.  And the second is that Eastern universities entered into contracts with the state. East of Winnipeg, very few new universities were created in this period.  Newfoundland (not yet part of Canada) created Memorial University after WWI, and Mount Saint Vincent and Saint Thomas

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September 21, 2018 3 Comments

The Tightening Labour Market

Yesterday, I took a quick trip back to the early part of the decade for a reminder of how bad the “skills shortage” debate of 5-6 years ago was.  Today, I want to talk a little bit about how we may be heading into something like an actual skills shortage right now, and what the parameters of that shortage look like. The best place to look for evidence on general skills shortages is the Bank of Canada’s quarterly Business Outlook Survey.

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September 19, 2018 No Comments

Comparing College and University Funding

[the_ad id=”11745″] While I was putting together The State of Post-Secondary Education, 2018 I did a simple comparison looking at provincial government funding for universities and colleges, using data from FIUC and FINCOL (the Statscan surveys of the finances of universities and colleges, respectively)  Here’s what I found: Figure 1: Provincial Government Funding per Full-time Equivalent Student, 2015-16 I had a hard time believing this relatively small gap was actually true: everybody knows universities get more money from governments than colleges, right? But I

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September 13, 2018 1 Comment

Work-Integrated Learning: We Can Do Better

You may have seen that late last week, the Business Higher Education Roundtable (BHER) rounded up a number of big names from colleges, universities and businesses to sign a letter to Finance Bill Morneau calling for the development of a National Work-Integrated Learning (WIL) Strategy as part of the 2019 Budget.  What should we make of this? On the one hand, it is certainly a sign that lots of people are taking WIL seriously.  And that’s a good thing.  Canada is

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September 11, 2018 1 Comment
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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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