On the day of the Ontario budget, I half-sarcastically lamented on twitter that since the budget adopted so many good ideas that I (among others) had pushed over the years that, what was there left to write about? But having now had a few days to think about it, it’s occurred to me that there is still a lot of room left to innovate in student aid. So, herewith, the policy agenda for the next decade or so: 1) Nine
Last week, the government of Canada announced to great fanfare (Hip Hip Hooray! Caloo Callay!) that Canada has a new international education brand. They actually meant “logo” not “brand”, but whatever – long past due because the old logo was terrible. To wit: Ridiculous, right? “Education in/au Canada”? Most students who want to come study in Canada do so in order to improve their English, and Ottawa comes up with a logo that requires you to
There was an interesting little op-ed in the Vancouver Sun the other day, to the effect that faculty are “waking up”, “realizing their voices matter”, and taking collective action to “effect substantive change at UBC”. You can read it, here. I think it is a fantastic piece. It’s great when people in a community realise they have the power to change things, and begin acting together to effect that change. My only question is: what was stopping them from acting
A couple of weeks ago, the Times Higher Education put together a cute infographic showing how many square metres an academic salary bought in different parts of the world (the full article is here). I thought I would try the same thing for here in Canada. So, here’s what I did. I took median academic salaries for major universities in Canada for the 2010-11 year, the last year for which comparable data is available (yes, it’s a travesty. But the travesty isn’t just that Statscan
I was going to stay off the blog this whole week (I need a reading week, too!), but there was a budget in Ontario yesterday. A weird and wonderful (if somewhat under-documented) budget, which is going to change the way we think about student aid, tuition, and affordability in Canada for decades to come. Here are the basics: all of Ontario’s different grants and loan remission programs are being merged together into one big up-front grant program (all the provincial
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