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Category: Government

The Warren Proposal

No doubt everyone has heard about the ginormous ($1.25 trillion) promise that Massachusetts Senator and Democratic Presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren made around post-secondary education last week.  But I suspect more people heard/saw the heat and noise about the promise rather than the promise itself.  So, herewith, a quick rundown and analysis: So, the first thing to note is that technically the package contained several policies.  The two major ones are about making tuition free in public schools, and a massive

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April 30, 2019 1 Comment

Performance-Based Funding 101: The Indicators

Ok guys, I’m going to take the rest of the week to nerd out about performance-based funding (PBF) indicators, since clearly this is all anyone here in Ontario is going to be talking about for the next few months.  I’m going to start with the issue of what indicators are going to be used—and fair warning: this is going to be long. (Reminder to readers: I actually do this stuff for a living.  If you think your institution needs help

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April 23, 2019 5 Comments

If Canada Were Serious About Higher Education (coda)

Before reality intruded with a bunch of interesting stories from Ontario and New Brunswick, I was talking about the ways Canadian higher education is achieving less than it could: how the practice of our federal system condemns us to incoherence, how provincial governments are insufficiently focussed on results and how institutions don’t take internal quality assurance or improvement seriously. But what to do about it? First, we need to diagnose the problem correctly.  Clearly, this is not a problem with a single source: pretty much

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April 18, 2019 1 Comment

New Brunswick Brings the Stupid

Before we were rudely interrupted by the Ontario government doing something both interesting and mysterious on performance outcomes, I promised you all news out of New Brunswick. This matters to maybe fifteen of you, but you know, this blog is nothing if not faithful to geographically micro-targeting higher education nerds. So here we go. Recall that back under the Conservative government of Bernard Lord, the New Brunswick government introduced a titanically wasteful graduate tax rebate, which was a massive windfall

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April 16, 2019 No Comments

How to Avoid Sounding Misinformed About Performance-Based Funding

Judging from various commentary I’ve seen/heard over the last few days, I suspect we’re all about to hear quite a lot of nonsense about Ontario’s proposed new Performance-based Funding (PBF) system.  Some of this is a natural consequence of the Conservatives announcing a general policy without announcing any details, which allows people’s imaginations to run rampant (and where Conservatives and higher education are concerned, academics’ imaginations can get pretty wild).  So, let’s just go through a few basics about PBF

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April 15, 2019 No 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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