Category: Government

Budget Commentary 2024

Good (very early morning) all. Please find attached HESA’s Review of the 2024 Federal Budget. It’s a complicated budget with a lot of moving pieces, but the HESA Towers team did an amazing job last night in putting it all together for your enjoyment/edification. My take on this budget? Well, it is a difficult one to parse. There’s an effective cut to international student mobility. There’s an increase in funding to apprenticeships and First Nations’ students. This seems like a good trade. And

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How Godawful were the Nineties?

No, this isn’t a Chuck Klosterman riff, and nor is it a pitch for Andrew Potter’s new blog on the end of the analog age (although I would strongly recommend reading both if that period is of any interest to you). It is, however, an attempt to close a little gap in my readers’ knowledge. I have been told by some of my millennial readers that my frequent references to the horror of the 1990s fly completely over the heads

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Are We Out of Ideas?

I was prepping yesterday for my podcast interview with Australian higher education expert Andrew Norton on the subject of the Australian Universities’ Accord (watch for it a week tomorrow) and while reading the report—which is a competent one, as these things go—it occurred to me: my God, this is boring. Used to be you could count on the Australians to come up with at least one or two cool ideas that would make you think” “really? We can do that?”

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Lagging

I was perusing a Chronicle of Higher Education article on American state expenditures on post-secondary education when I saw a completely jaw-dropping graph. Figure 1: Jaw-Dropping Visual from The Chronicle on State Funding I mean…wow. Right? This figure actually lines up with something I had noticed a few months ago about state-level spending in the 1960s and 1970s. Though there is lots of talk about “wars on higher education” in the United States; in fact, there isn’t a very tight

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Student Visas, Old Systems and New

If you want to know how messed up the visa processing system is about to get in the next couple of months…well, buckle up. Y’all may remember that when Minister Marc Miller announced caps on student visas, he indicated that each province would be responsible for allocating visas among its own institutions. All provinces will be required to provide students with a letter or certificate attached to their applications, indicating the institution that the student is to attend. This already

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