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Category: Canada

The Dollar Quandary

If you haven’t been hiding under a rock these last few months, you may have noticed that the US dollar is on a roll.  And it’s not just on a roll in Canada, where the price of oil has reduced the value of our own currency; since mid-2014, the US dollar is up over 20% against a trade-weighted basket of currencies. This creates some interesting conundrums and strategy options for pricing international education. The change in the dollar’s status means that everyone’s

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February 19, 2016 3 Comments

Some Curious Student Loan Numbers

Every once in awhile, it’s good to go searching through statistical abstracts just to see if the patterns you take for granted can still be taken for granted.  So I recently went hunting through some CSLP annual reports and statistical abstracts to see what I could find.  And I’m glad I did, because there are some really surprising numbers in the data. So here’s the really big take-away: the number of students borrowing from the Canada Student Loan Program rose from 365,363

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February 17, 2016 1 Comment

The Dilemma of Western Education in Saudi Arabia

I see that Ontario premier Kathleen Wynne recently took offense to the fact that Algonquin College is operating a male-only vocational college in Jazan, Saudi Arabia, calling the arrangement “unacceptable”. What should we make of this? First of all, let’s be clear about women and higher education in Saudi Arabia.  There are a lot of them; in fact, far more women attend post-secondary education than men in the country.  They just don’t – for the most part – attend the

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February 5, 2016 2 Comments

Tenure and Aboriginal Culture

You may or may not have noticed a story in the National Post over the weekend relating to a scholar at the University of British Columbia named Lorna June McCue, who has brought a human rights tribunal case against UBC for denying her tenure.  The basics of the story are that UBC didn’t think she’d produced enough – or indeed, any – peer-reviewed research to be awarded tenure in the Faculty of Law; Ms. McCue argues that since she adheres to an

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January 26, 2016 6 Comments

Marginal Costs, Marginal Revenue

Businesses have a pretty good way of knowing when to offer more or less of a good.  It’s encapsulated in the equation MC = MR, and shown in the graphic below.                 Briefly, in the production of any good, unit-costs fall to start with as the benefits of economies of scale start to rise.  Eventually, however, if production is expanded far enough you get diseconomies of scale, and the marginal cost begins to rise.  Where the

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January 21, 2016 3 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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