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Category: Government

Report Back on the National Defence Research Roundtable

You may recall that back in mid-November – on the back of some discussions that took place at the University Vice-President’s Network meeting in Victoria – HESA launched a call for a meeting in Ottawa focused on: i) how to coordinate and advance defence research in Canada, and ii) developing sector-wide advice on how Canada should structure future defence and security research investments. On December 15th, 77 people showed up in Ottawa to discuss exactly that.  Today, we are releasing National Defence Research

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January 14, 2026 1 Comment

Three

Just before Christmas, an interesting blog post appeared on the Canadian conservative website The Hub. It was by Mitch Davidson, late of the Ford Administration in Queen’s Park, and his subject was the topic of three-year bachelor’s degrees. Davidson is pro-, and he advances some fairly spectacular claims on behalf of such credentials. Just look at the headline: How Switching to three-year post-secondary degrees could kickstart the Canadian economy, or the claim later down in the paper that “widespread adoption

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January 12, 2026 3 Comments

The World of Higher Education – Year in Review 2025

Morning all. Today, HESA is releasing The World of Higher Education – Year in Review 2025, the first in our to-be-annual series chronicling how the world’s higher education systems have fared over the past twelve months. You can download it here. Despite taking up something on the order of 1% of global GDP and educating 3-4% of the world’s population in any given year, higher education is, perhaps surprisingly, a field where most of the analytical work is resoundingly national

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December 3, 2025 No Comments

That BC Post-Secondary Review

Last week, the Government of British Columbia announced it was going to hold a post-secondary review.  Here’s the announcement. And here’s the terms of reference (ToR) for the review, possibly the longest ToR in Canadian history, including – get this – a bunch of blacked-out text indicating censoring, which was made even more hilarious because the censored bits quite clearly don’t say anything incriminating. Figure 1: The Hilarious Bits of the BC ToR The basics of the announcement are that

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December 2, 2025 4 Comments

Funding, Free Riding, and the Future of Canadian Science

Ever since World War II science — that is, state funded science — and economic progress have been seen to go hand in hand. And for the most part, governments have been happy to let scientists themselves decide where much of the money goes. But things have been changing lately, and not just in the United States, where the Trump administration has awarded itself the right to involve itself in any science award for any reason. Several countries, notably Australia

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November 27, 2025 1 Comment

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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