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Category: Government

All Hands on Deck

Alberta wasn’t the only province to release a report on post-secondary education last Thursday.  Out in St. John’s, the three commissioners of the Independent Review of the Post-Secondary Education System in Newfoundland and Labrador finally, after much delay, published its report, pithily entitled All Hands on Deck.   Just to give you a rundown on the province before we get into the report: Newfoundland and Labrador has two multi-campus institutions, Memorial University of Newfoundland (MUN for short) and the College of the

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May 4, 2021 No Comments

That Alberta PSE Strategy (Finally)

Last Thursday, the Government of Alberta finally released the long-awaited Alberta 2030: Building Skills for Jobs strategy, optimistically subtitled “a 10-year strategy for post-secondary education”.   So, after all the hullaballoo of the last year or so, what does it all mean for the province’s universities and colleges? Let’s get the process stuff out of the way first.   The province did kind of publish some of the background research McKinsey did for $3.5M.  It’s incorporated in this 217-page power point (no, I am not kidding).  Conceivably, this

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May 3, 2021 1 Comment

Micro-credentials in Ontario

The word “micro-credential”, precisely because remains relatively undefined, is absolute catnip to politicians.  It’s tabula rasa: you can tell politicians the word means damn near anything and not only will they believe you, but no one can contradict you because no one can contradict you.  Here is a list of things at least one provincial education minister/ministry appears to believe about micro-credentials. In other words, nearly everything about micro-credentials is down to design details rather than being automatic properties.  But this

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April 28, 2021 1 Comment

Laurentian Blues (8) Causes, Fault, and Lessons

Good morning.  I had hoped to get you a bit more detail about what has happened at Laurentian in the last few days, but as usual there is less info available than there should be.  Here’s what we know: Late Monday, the university released a list of 69 programs that have been discontinued.  Most of them are programs which have fewer than 30 students (in some cases considerably fewer), and a lot of these programs are in humanities, which is not

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April 15, 2021 15 Comments

Laurentian Blues (7) – The Process

Last week, the Laurentian University Senate met in a bizarre closed-door session to approve a package of cuts, the details of which are still mostly unknown.  On the basis of this, quite a number of people received termination notices at Laurentian University yesterday.  I have not seen any definitive numbers on losses (the university, typical of its entire approach through this crisis, is being crap at communicating actual information), but I have seen estimates of anywhere between 80 and 110

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April 13, 2021 11 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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