The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Canada

That Andrew Scheer Free Speech Promise

That Andrew Scheer Free Speech Promise You may recall that a few weeks ago I profiled the higher education/science/youth proposals of the various Conservative Party leadership hopefuls.  You may also recall that the candidate who eventually won the context, Andrew Scheer, had one proposal that distinguished him from the rest of the pack, to wit: In addition, Scheer pledges that “public universities or colleges that do not foster a culture of free speech and inquiry on campus” will “not have support from

Read More »
June 8, 2017 2 Comments

National Patterns of Student Housing

The other day I published a graph on student housing in Canada and the United States that seemed to grab a lot of people’s attention.  It was this one: Figure 1: Student Living Arrangements, Canada vs. US People seemed kind of shocked by this and wondered what causes the differences.  So I thought I’d take a shot at answering this. (caveat: remember, this is data from a multi-campus survey and I genuinely have no idea how representative this is of the student

Read More »
June 7, 2017 3 Comments

Making “Applied” Research Great Again

One of the rallying calls of part of the scientific community over the past few years is how under the Harper government there was too much of a focus on “applied” research and not enough of a focus on “pure”/”basic”/”fundamental research.  This call is reaching a fever pitch following the publication of the Naylor Report (which, to its credit, did not get into a basic/applied debate and focussed instead on whether or not the research was “investigator-driven”, which is a

Read More »
June 6, 2017 6 Comments

Student Health (Part 3)

You know how it is when someone tries to make a point about Canadian higher education using data from American universities? It’s annoying.  Makes you want to (verbally) smack them upside the head. Canada and the US are different, you want to yell. Don’t assume the data are the same! But of course the problem is there usually isn’t any Canadian data, which is part of why these generalizations get started in the first place. Well, one of the neat

Read More »
June 5, 2017 2 Comments

Student Health (part 2)

Now you may have seen a headline recently talking about skyrocketing mental health problems among students.  Specifically, this one from the Toronto Star, which says, among other things: A major survey of 25,164 Ontario university students by the American College Health Association showed that between 2013 and 2016, there was a 50-per-cent increase in anxiety, a 47-per-cent increase in depression and an 86-per-cent increase in substance abuse. Suicide attempts also rose 47 per cent during that period. That’s a pretty stunning set of

Read More »
June 2, 2017 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...