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Category: Canada

2026 Rankings Overview (International)

Yesterday we looked at how individual institutions within Canada fared in the last round of international rankings. One of the key phenomena that we saw was that while the eight Canadian institutions in the top two hundred of the major rankings were more or less holding their own, the slightly less research-intensive were seeing their numbers slip across all. Today, I want to show why that phenomenon is more about improvements in higher education in other countries than it is

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January 7, 2026 1 Comment

2026 Rankings Overview (Canada)

Most years, I do a quick overview of the major international rankings and how Canadian institutions have fared in them. Today is the day I do that for the 2026 rankings from the Times Higher and QS, as well as the 2025 Shanghai Ranking (Shanghai is dated the year they come out, Times Higher and QS are numbered like automobiles, one year ahead of the release date). In a bit of a departure from past practice, I am going to

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January 6, 2026 5 Comments

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

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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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