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Category: Canada

OECD data says still no underfunding

The OECD’s annual datapalooza-tastic publication Education at a Glance was released yesterday.  The pdf is available for free here.  Let me take you through a couple of the highlights around Higher Education. For the following comparisons, I show Canada against the rest of the G7 (minus Italy because honestly, economically, who cares?), plus Australia because it’s practically our twin, Korea because it’s cool, Sweden because someone always asks about Scandinavia and the OECD average because hey that just makes sense. 

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September 16, 2016 No Comments

Innovation Policy: Are Universities Part of the Problem?

We’re talking a lot about Innovation in Canada these days. Especially in universities, where innovation policy is seen as a new cash funnel. I would like to suggest that this attitude on the part of universities is precisely part of Canada’s problem when it comes to Innovation. Here’s the basic issue: innovation – the kind that expands the economy – is something that firms do. They take ideas from here and there and put them together to create new processes

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September 15, 2016 3 Comments

The Canadian Way of Study Abroad

A few years ago, I think around the time that HESA Towers ran a conference on internationalization, I realized there was something weird about the way Canadian higher education institutions talked about study abroad.  They talked about it as helping students “bridge the gap between theory and practice”, “increasing engagement”, and “hands-on learning”. That’s odd, I thought.  That sounds like experiential learning, not study abroad.  Which is when it hit me: in Canada, unlike virtually everywhere else in the world,

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September 14, 2016 1 Comment

How Many Canadian Students Study Abroad? How Many Should?

If you look at the current issue of Policy Options, there is a startling claim made in the sub-headline of an article by Universities Australia CEO Belinda Robinson; namely, that “five times as many Australian undergraduates are studying abroad as their Canadian counterparts”.  It’s not a claim Robinson herself makes – it seems likely that it’s been added by the editorial staff at Policy Options.  The problem is it’s not correct. The Canadian numbers come from a periodic survey Universities

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September 12, 2016 4 Comments

Trends in Canadian University Finance

New income and expenditure data on Canadian universities came out over the summer courtesy of StatsCan and our friends over at the Canadian Association of University Business Officers (CAUBO), so today it’s time to check in on what the latest financial trends. In 2014-15, income at Canadian Universities was, overall, a record 35.5 Billion dollars (just above 2% of GDP, if you’re counting).  That’s up 1% in real terms over the previous year and up 5% on five years ago

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September 8, 2016 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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