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Category: Canada

Can Ottawa Do Innovation?

The National Post’s David Akin had a useful article last week entitled Canada Has Failed at Innovation for 100 years: Can The Trudeau Government Change That?  Read it, it’s good.  It’s based around a new-ish Peter Nicholson article in Canadian Public Policy which is unfortunately not available without a subscription.  But Nicholson’s argument appears to be: we’ve done pretty well our entire history as a country copying or importing technology from Americans: what exactly is it that Ottawa is going

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February 27, 2017 4 Comments

Garbage Data on Sexual Assaults

I am going to do something today which I expect will not put me in good stead with one of my biggest clients.  But the Government of Ontario is considering something unwise and I feel it best to speak up. As many of you know, the current Liberal government is very concerned about sexual harassment and sexual assault on campus, and has devoted no small amount of time and political capital to getting institutions to adopt new rules and regulations around said

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February 23, 2017 3 Comments

Notes for the NDP Leadership Race

As contestants start to jump into the federal NDP leadership race, it’s only a matter of time before someone starts promising free tuition to all across the land.  Now, I’m not going to rehash why free tuition is both regressive and undesirable (though if you really want to take a gander through the archives on free tuition, have a look here).  But I do think I can do some public service by talking about federalism and higher education, or rather:

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February 22, 2017 4 Comments

Canada’s Rankings Run-up

Canada did quite well out of a couple of university rankings which have come out in the last month or so: the Times Higher education’s “Most International Universities” ranking, and the QS “Best Student Cities” ranking.  But there’s actually less to this success than meets the eye.  Let me explain. Let’s start with the THE’s “Most International” ranking.  I have written about this before, saying it does not pass the “fall-down-laughing” test which is really the only method of testing a ranking’s

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February 20, 2017 1 Comment

How to Fund (3)

You all may remember that in early 2015, the province of Ontario announced it was going to review its university funding formula.  There was no particular urgency to do so, and many were puzzled as to “why now”?  The answer, we were told, was that the Liberal government thought it could make improvements in the system by changing the funding structure.  Specifically, they said in their consultation document that they thought they could use a new formula to improve i) improve

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February 16, 2017 No 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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