Category: Government

Building a Nation of Innovators

OK, so I was going to share with you some interesting research from Europe and elsewhere on Individual Learning Accounts, which everyone in Ottawa seems to think are going to be A Big Deal in the upcoming budget. However, that will have to wait because yesterday the Innovation Minister, Navdeep Bains, speaking yesterday to what was no doubt a packed room at the CD Howe Institute in the middle of a full-on Toronto white-out, released a fantastic new piece of

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The Four Logics of International Student Mobility

One of the significant challenges in analyzing policies around international student mobility is that there are multiple competing logics at work within the field.  However, the tensions between these competing logics are often not acknowledged, which makes it difficult to understand how to make choices between them. Today, we will look at four logics concerning in-bound student mobility, in order to disentangle them and promote sensible policy analysis. The first logic of internationalization is what I call the pilgrimage logic:

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Loans Work

If you spend any time looking at student aid research, you’ll be struck by how much empirical evidence there is on the effectiveness of grants (or, more broadly, “changes in net tuition”), and how little there is in terms of the effectiveness of loans.  Thus, one might be tempted to think that this means grants are effective and loans are not, but it’s a bit more complicated than that. There are a couple of reasons why it has been difficult

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That Globe Feature on Data Gaps

The big longread event in this weekend’s papers was, without question, Shannon Gormley’s piece in Macleans on the Thai Cave Rescue (if you haven’t read it yet, stop everything and do so.  I’ll be here when you get back.  Amazing, right?  OK, let’s move on.) Anyways, the second most important longread was the big Globe and Mail feature on Canada’s data gaps, which was actually two pieces, one on data gaps generally and one specifically on Statistics Canada and why the agency is not very good.  There was much applause in the

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The Future of Student Organizations

OK, so on Tuesday I outlined what we know and don’t know about the Ford government’s new policy of rendering non-tuition fees non-mandatory and suggested that while some of it was confused and confusing, the effect was going to be quite detrimental to independent student groups.  Even if we lend this move some lofty motives and say it is about a positive right not to be forced to associate, or the need to make student groups more responsive to their members (as

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