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Category: Funding and Finances

That Was The Quarter That Was, Summer 2025

Welcome to TWTQTW for June-September. Things were a little slow in July, but with back to school happening in most of the Northern Hemisphere sometime between last August and late September, the stories began pouring in.  You might think that “back to school” would deliver up lots of stories about enrolment trends, but you’d mostly be wrong. While few countries are as bad as Canada when it comes to up-to date enrolment data, it’s a rare country that can give

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October 8, 2025 No Comments

Education at a Glance 2025, Part 1

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released its annual stat fest, Education at a Glance (EAG), two weeks ago and I completely forgot about it. But since not a single Canadian news outlet wrote anything about it (neither it nor the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada saw fit to put together a “Canada” briefing, apparently), this blog – two weeks later than usual – is still technically a scoop. Next week, I will review some new data

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September 23, 2025 No Comments

Turning the Corner

Things have been bleak in higher education the last couple of years, and no doubt they will remain bleak for a while. But it recently became clear to me how we’ll know that we are turning the corner: it will be the moment when provincial governments start allowing significant rises in domestic tuition. This became clear to me when I was having a discussion with a senior provincial official (in a province I shall not name) about tuition. I was

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September 22, 2025 4 Comments

The Shrinking Research University Business Model

For most of the past 30 or so years, big Canadian universities have all been working off more or less the same business model: find areas where you can make big profits and use those profits to make yourself more research-intensive. That’s it. That’s the whole model. International students? Big profit centres. Professional programs? You better believe those are money-makers. Undergraduate studies – well, they might not make that much money in toto but holy moly first-year students are taken

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September 16, 2025 6 Comments

Born on Third Base

Cast your minds back to January of 2024, when the federal government suddenly decided that housing was an issue, international students were the problem and implemented a complicated and irritating-to-implement set of caps that were 35% lower nationally than for 2023 (and in Ontario significantly more than that). Then, in 2025 came another set of changes including a 10% cut in the national limit. And then, on top of that, a set of new conditions on post-graduate work visas were

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September 15, 2025 6 Comments

One Thought to Start Your Day

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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