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Category: Government

National Strategies on International Education

This post is co-authored by Robert Burroughs, HESA Research Associate.  A few years ago, when the Government of Canada released its “Strategy for International Education”, I gave the document a lot of stick because it wasn’t really a strategy, possessed no serious logic model and generally didn’t link resources to expected outcomes.  It was more of a laundry list of things attached to a relatively arbitrary target more than anything else. Having recently had occasion to read a few other countries’ international

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April 2, 2018 No Comments

A Challenge and An Opportunity in College Education

Earlier this week the Manitoba Government released a report that I and my colleague Yves Pelletier worked on for most of last year, the Manitoba College Review (you can read the report here). It was a challenging assignment, but I am very grateful to the many people to everyone who spent time with us and contributed to the report, and to all the alumni who answered our survey.  In terms of system governance, we made some fairly sweeping recommendations, ones that give government

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March 22, 2018 4 Comments

Why Are We Applauding Statscan’s Lack of Strategic Focus?

Remember about twenty months ago when everyone was gaga over the idea that the feds were going to pay for an expanded version of the faculty survey? And there would be data on part-timers!  And on equity criteria!   And maybe community colleges too! Of course it was never clear that this would achieve anything like what its supporters claimed (mainly because it’s not clear how many profs are prepared to have certain personal data on things like race and disability recorded by

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March 13, 2018 2 Comments

Superclusters, Cold Fusion and Perpetual Motion

When writing last week about superclusters, I neglected to go through the actual “economic impact statements” that were being touted by the clusters themselves. It seems that the Industry Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED), has to some degree accepted the statements.  And I think this is important because some of what is being suggested is pretty close to a national scandal. So, let’s take a quick look at what, allegedly, we’re getting for our $950 million in Supercluster investments.

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February 23, 2018 3 Comments

Ten Bad Arguments about Free Tuition in Canada

So this weekend at the NDP convention, delegates voted in favour of a free tuition policy.  Based on a totally unscientific scan of twitter afterwards, here are the ten most common arguments in favour of this move, and why each of them is wrong. 1. The federal government can totally impose free tuition on the provinces No, it can’t.  The best it could do would be to pay the provinces to reduce tuition, which could be difficult given that they

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February 20, 2018 17 Comments
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