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Category: Government

How bad is it going to get in Ontario? Really Bad.

Last Friday, the Ontario government issued a media release outlining what it was going to do with respect to international students in the wake of the Government of Canada’s Monday announcement on study permits and work visas. I reproduce it substantially intact below because it is so objectively terrible. To protect the integrity of postsecondary education and promote employment in critical sectors like health care and the skilled trades, the government’s measures will include the following: Colleges and Universities Career

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January 30, 2024 7 Comments

Global McGill

Welcome back, everyone.  Let’s jump in. You will recall that last fall the Legault government, reeling from a by-election loss to a suddenly resurgent Parti Québécois, decided to parade its nationalist bona fides by giving an unprovoked kicking to some major anglophone institutions: to wit, McGill, Concordia and Bishop’s.  This kicking – which was imposed on all universities but clearly had a disproportionate impact on the three anglo schools – consisted of two separate policies. Imposing a minimum $17,000/year tuition

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January 8, 2024 3 Comments

Curves and Formulas

Time for a quick economics lesson. Every class in a post-secondary institution has a cost curve.  It looks something like this: Once an instructor is assigned to a class, that class has a set cost to the university regardless of how many students enroll, shown above as the Cost Curve (CC).  It’s mainly a function of the instructor’s salary and materials costs, which are very low in lecture courses, higher in laboratory courses, and highest in clinical courses.  That CC

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December 5, 2023 2 Comments

Follow up on Quebec

If you just gauge public sentiment by twitter, it would seem the that CAQ’s policies on international and out-of-province students announced last Friday have a lot of support.  Certainly, someone was quick to put together a few infographics – highly inaccurate ones, to be sure – for use as memes.  But usually the arguments were phrased in terms of whatabbouteries: how expensive programs in Ontario were (usually based on cherry-picking the costs at, say, U of T Law and pretending

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October 19, 2023 7 Comments

Accepting Failure and Trying Something New

If there is one thing that drives me to despair about Canadian universities these days, it is how poor many federal government relations (GR) strategies are.   I can boil the issues down to three specific aspects. Too many cooks.  30 years ago, I am fairly sure no university in Canada had a permanent independent GR presence in Ottawa (apart from the two schools located there).  Now there are a couple of dozen who do.  Much of what they are trying

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October 17, 2023 4 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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