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Category: Canada

Institutional Branding (Part 1)

Branding is one of those things that inspires strong views in higher education.  Some fret over the fact that university brands are too similar, others get indignant over the fact that branding is necessary at all, usually using some variation on the rhetorical argument “what are we, dishwashing soap?” Part of the problem, I think, stems from misunderstandings about what brands are and how universities use them.  Every university has a “brand” whether it wants one or not.  A brand

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June 2, 2016 3 Comments

Three Unconnected Thoughts on PSE and Aboriginal Peoples

1)      Changing Disciplines In the last five years or so, I’ve seen a real change in the way Aboriginal students are moving through the country’s PSE system.  For a whole number of reasons, aboriginal students were traditionally concentrated either in humanities disciplines like history and sociology, or they were in disciplines which led to careers in social services or direct band employment (child care, police foundations, education, nursing).  STEM and Business fields simply weren’t in the picture.  That’s changed substantially over

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May 27, 2016 3 Comments

Canadian B-Schools and Economic Growth

If there is one thing university Presidents desire, it is to be useful to society – and preferably to the government of the day, too.  After all, post-Humboldt, universities exist to strengthen the state.  The better a university does that, the more it will be appreciated and, hopefully, the better funded it will be.  So it has always struck me as a bit odd how little universities (an business schools in particular) have really done in order to help work

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May 18, 2016 2 Comments

The New-Brunswick Step-Function

So there’s a kerfuffle going on in New Brunswick about the government’s new “tuition-free” policy for students from families with under $60K in income which I mentioned in passing a couple of weeks ago.  Basically, the problem is that the government drew up the program hurriedly, on the back of an envelope, and didn’t think through the consequences. If you just listen to the launch announcements, the new New Brunswick program is similar to the new Ontario program (which you

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May 16, 2016 2 Comments

What Ottawa Spends

The Parliamentary Budget Officer did everyone a solid yesterday by publishing a really helpful compilation of federal government expenditures on higher education. According to the publication, the Government of Canada in 2013-14 spent $12.3 billion on post-secondary education (not including money for apprenticeships, training programs or labour market agreements; that includes $5.1 billion for “human capital measures”, which is mostly Canada Student Loans and Tax Expenditures of various kinds, $3.5 billion for research, three-quarters of which is from the granting

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May 6, 2016 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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