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Category: Canada

The Small-Tent Path to Disaster

Morning all. Back to the grind. One of the surprising things I discovered over the break was that the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) seems to think that the sector is in good enough shape that it can afford to apply purity tests to external support. See specifically the article in the last CAUT Bulletin by the University of Regina’s Marc Spooner entitled Not All Calls for Public Funding are Good. Spooner’s ire is directed at the Royal Bank

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January 5, 2026 No Comments

New Statscan Data on Students and Academic Staff

Over the last few weeks – while I have been busy obsessing about Year in Review 2025 – a couple of big Statscan releases came out. One was about students in 2023/2024 and one was about academic staff in 2024/25. Time to catch up. The student data is the slightly more interesting of the two, because it (finally) shows the system essentially at the height of the international student boom in the late fall of 2023 (Statscan student data is

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December 8, 2025 1 Comment

That BC Post-Secondary Review

Last week, the Government of British Columbia announced it was going to hold a post-secondary review.  Here’s the announcement. And here’s the terms of reference (ToR) for the review, possibly the longest ToR in Canadian history, including – get this – a bunch of blacked-out text indicating censoring, which was made even more hilarious because the censored bits quite clearly don’t say anything incriminating. Figure 1: The Hilarious Bits of the BC ToR The basics of the announcement are that

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December 2, 2025 4 Comments

Profit, Education, and Student Grants

One of the less-noticed measures in the November 4 budget had to do with restrictions on student loans. Specifically, it was about banning students attending for-profit institutions from accessing grants provided by the Canada Student Financial Assistance Program (CSFAP). Today, I want to examine the rationale behind this move and its likely effects. But first, some history. CSFAP did not always have a big investment in grants. In fact, it had none at all for the first thirty years of its

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November 18, 2025 1 Comment

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

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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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