It’s been awhile since we’ve taken a policy tour out west, but it’s time I think to take a look at what’s going on in Alberta, where the NDP government is past its midpoint and starting to work towards an election in 2019. One day, someone is going to write a fantastic political book about the Alberta NDP. This is a party that went from (essentially) nothing to government in the space of a few crazy weeks in 2015. They
[the_ad id=”11819″] In December, Statistics Canada released its 2015/2016 enrolment data from the Post-Secondary Student Information System. I didn’t quite have time to get to it before the break, but on New Year’s Day I decided to take a little stroll through the data. Here’s what I found:. The first obvious thing to note is that growth in student numbers is a thing of the past. For the second straight year, total enrolment in Canadian post-secondary is down slightly, which is the
The first budget of the rather short-lived Paul Martin administration introduced a fairly cool idea to Canadian policy: the Canada Learning Bond (CLB). The idea built on some the then-trendy work of American sociologist Michael Sherraden (among others) around asset-based solutions to poverty. Basically, the idea was that one of the reasons middle-class people act middle-class is that that they have a specific set of time-preferences; on the whole, working-class individuals tend to have shorter time-preferences and hence are less
Yesterday, Statistics Canada did the last of its big data dumps on the 2016 census and it covered education. As usual, the HESA Towers team swung into action to get you the highlights (no, really, today was a big team effort, Jonathan W. and Robert B. did extra duty to get you this post today). Now, census data isn’t usually something that drives big headlines. You usually have plenty of notice about things like “people getting more educated than they
The big news in Canada last week was the unveiling by the governing Liberals of a “National Housing Strategy”. Housing is a good policy file to watch for higher education policy types, because housing and higher education share a lot of qualities. This might not seem like an obvious policy analogy, but hear me out. Shelter, like higher education, is often viewed as a “right”, but it’s one where the base assumption is (in North America, anyway) is that it
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.
