The key to understanding what post-secondary education is going to look like a few years down the road – say, 2017 – is to look at what is likely to happen to government funding. We can’t know exactly what governments will spend on PSE, but we can know how much money they are going to have available to spend simply by working out how much money each will likely have once health expenditures (which make up just 40% of the budget in
A persistent sore point within higher education is the complaint that politicians want higher education to be, “more geared to the needs of the economy” – the implication of this being that higher education is a public good in and of itself, which should hold itself above mere utilitarian concerns. This is a puzzling argument. The arrival of state funding in the early nineteenth century was explicitly predicated on higher education being used as a tool to help strengthen the economy of
Although its release didn’t get much play last week, HEQCO’s report on the results of the Strategic Mandate Agreement process was noteworthy. Read casually, it’s a formal and polite response to a government request for advice. But it’s actually better understood as a primal scream – albeit one elegantly rendered in true Embrace-and-Contain style – demanding some grown-up policy-making for a change. The SMA process was initiated back when Glen Murray (remember him?) decided to negotiate Strategic Mandates with each of
On Thursday afternoon, Finance Minister, Jim Flaherty, stood on the floor of the House of Commons, and delivered the Government’s eighth Federal Budget. In lieu of an OTTSD for Friday, we at HESA have examined the document, and produced a commentary on its implications for higher education in Canada. You can read our 2013 Federal Budget Commentary, here. Thanks for reading. And as always, let us know what you think.
So, I see that the Government of Canada is going to have-a-go at designating Canadian institutions for their suitability to accept foreign students, and deny entry visas to students who wish to study at non-designated institutions. Having watched this process unfold in the student loans arena for the past twenty years, or so, I can only say, “good luck with that”. Designation isn’t a new thing in Ottawa. The HRDC spent the better part of a decade trying to get a
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.
