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Category: Government

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

Manitoba Manifesto Analysis 2023

Ok folks, you know the drill.  An election means a manifesto analysis, and with the Manitoba election only 24 hours away, I’m overdue on this one. Manitoba is a 2-and-a-half party system.  Since 1969, the NDP and Progressive Conservatives have each had three periods in power (NDP for 30 years, Tories for 24), so these are the two platforms to watch. The Liberals have held seats in the legislature for all but 4 of those years, but only once managed

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October 2, 2023 No Comments

Demography, Incentives, and the Future of Canadian PSE

Let’s start with a little history. Figure 1 shows the evolution of the youth population (aged 18-21) in Canada from 1971 to 2022.   The remarkable thing here is that this demographic group peaked over 40 years ago.  What that means is that pretty much all the nearly tripled increase in domestic enrolments in the last four have come from increasing participation rates rather than population growth. Figure 1: Population Aged 18-21, by Region, Canada, 1971-2022 This growth has not been

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September 25, 2023 3 Comments

A Short Explainer of Public Private Partnerships in Ontario Colleges

I always get questions about international students and visas when I travel across Canada talking to university and college audiences.  And what I find is that in most parts of the country, they are genuinely puzzled about what is happening in Ontario.  Most say they have heard about all these “unscrupulous private colleges” who are “taking advantage of students.” Online, more racist theories suggest this is a story of “human trafficking” in which these “private colleges” are “in on a

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September 11, 2023 98 Comments

The Alberta Problem

Last week, the good folks of Alberta elected a United Conservative Party government for the next four years.  What does that mean for post-secondary education?  First, I think it’s a pretty good bet that – on the university side at least – we will continue to see more episodes of culture war nonsense along the lines of what we saw in Lethbridge last year.  Universities are kind of the epitome of the “effete lefty” culture that UCP likes to believe

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June 6, 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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