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Category: Government

Savings Plans

[the_ad id=”12755″] One of the unique aspects of Canada’s higher education funding system is its regime of Registered Education Savings Plans (RESPs) and various kinds of public subsidies to these plans – the Canada Education Savings Grant (CESG), the Alternative Canada Education Savings Grants (A-CESG) and the Canada Learning Bond.  What are all these things, and do they work as intended? Let’s start with RESPs, which are simply accounts in which interest and capital gains are allowed to accumulate tax-free. 

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June 20, 2018 No Comments

Post-Soviet Higher Education

As loyal readers know, I am a big believer that Soviet Higher Education teaches some real eternal truths about our sector (see here and here in particular).  This week I’ve been reading a book of essays called 25 Years of Transformations of Higher Education Systems in Post-Soviet Countries: Reform and Continuity edited by Jeroen Huisman, Anna Smolentseva and Isak Froumin.  And although structurally it’s a bit repetitive (as any book containing 15 identically-structured essays is likely to be), it’s very much worth a read

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June 15, 2018 No Comments

The Canadian Way of Quality Assurance

Occasionally, I write pieces noting how oddball Canadian higher education is in international context, usually in ways that are poorly understood.  I want to do that again today, specifically with the notion of external quality assurance, a topic so foreign to much of Canadian academia that it sounds entirely made up.  We recognize it for program accreditation in certain (mainly professional) fields, but the idea that institutions are held accountable this way is largely unknown to most Canadian universities. In most of the world,

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June 5, 2018 6 Comments

Post-Secondary Education, Skills, and Growth

Over the weekend, I’ve been doing two things: obsessing about who I am going to vote for in this godawful Ontario election, and reading about post-Soviet Russia (in particular, Stephen Kotkin’s Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000).  And these two things have got me thinking a lot about what makes for a good economy and a good society and the extent to which post-secondary education plays a role in all that. If there is one thing the twentieth century proved,

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June 4, 2018 2 Comments

What’s Left of the Bologna Process

Last week, Ministers responsible for higher education from the 48 countries, constituting the members of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), met in Paris for the regular triennial “Bologna Process Ministerial Conference”.  Which was odd, because the substantive bits of the Bologna Process have been over for about a decade now.  So, what were they talking about? Back in the day (20 years ago, to be exact), higher education across Europe was a hodge-podge of systems.  The French had initial

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May 30, 2018 1 Comment
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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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