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Category: Canada

Scholarly Outputs

Every couple of years, I do an analysis of Candian university research ouptut data from the Leiden rankings, which always provide excellent and transparent data on publications and citations linked to each university. And, well, it’s that time again. So let’s dive in. My first comparison is just about simple production: how many papers came out of each university? Figure 1 shows the data from the period 2020-2023. This graph doesn’t change much over time: Toronto is always way, way,

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November 17, 2025 4 Comments

Defence/Security Research

I have some news today about a new HESA initiative to convene a National Defence Research Roundtable. More details at the end of the blog. But first, a bit of context on the defence and security research landscape. In recent months, the Government of Canada has committed the country to meeting the NATO Defence Spending Pledge. This pledge is for all members to spend 5% of their respective GDP on core defence requirements and broader defence- and security-related spending by

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November 12, 2025 1 Comment

Budget Redux: Student Visas

Since last Tuesday, there have been a lot of stories (like this one and this one) talking about how the federal government is reducing the number of new student visas and, as a corollary, how this will negatively impact college and university finances. Many people have asked me why the HESA budget blog didn’t make a bigger deal out of this last week. The answer is: we did in fact write about it in the full Budget Commentary (pages 7-8),

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November 11, 2025 1 Comment

The Canada Student Grant Cut

Somewhat remarkably, no media have picked up the story that the Canada Student Grants were slashed in last week’s budget. Possibly, this is because the government did not issue a press release saying in big letters, “HEY, WE ARE LOADING MORE DEBT ON LOW-INCOME STUDENTS”, and, without such an admission, no one wants to do the hard work of working out what just is going on.   So, let me save everyone the trouble. Here’s what happened: In the 2019 election,

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November 10, 2025 No Comments

Budget Commentary 2025

Hi all. Budget Day was yesterday, and it was a doozy. The HESA Towers team worked late into the night putting together our usual Budget Commentary for you to peruse at your leisure. We hope you enjoy it. But if you haven’t the time to read it in full, here are the five big takeaways. First, although large spending cuts were previewed, the cuts that occurred could not prevent the government from racking up a budget which in real terms was similar to the

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November 5, 2025 4 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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