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Category: Government

Higher Education in Federal Countries

Maybe the most childish thing about Canadian higher education policy debates is the recurring insistence on the part of some English Canadians that higher education needs to be more of a federal responsibility (i.e. the central government needs to take a more active role).  If you exclude the motivated reasoning of Ottawa-based higher ed groups who want more things to happen in Ottawa so that they themselves can have more interesting things to do, this position is mostly born of

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March 8, 2019 1 Comment

“Consulting and Advising”, Ottawa-style

I received a note from someone in a federal ministry in Ottawa a couple of weeks ago.  It asked, would I be interested in having dinner with Minister (name withheld)?  You know, look into new policy initiatives, want to talk to a few experts, break bread together etc.  Sounds like fun, I said.  But you know that, for my sins, I live in Toronto, right?  Not Ottawa. Would this dinner invitation come with an airline ticket attached, or was I

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February 26, 2019 1 Comment

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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February 13, 2019 1 Comment

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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February 11, 2019 1 Comment

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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February 6, 2019 No Comments

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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