Category: Government

Incremental Change or System Overhaul? An Update on Higher Ed Reform in NZ with Roger Smyth

In some countries, higher education policy just seems to sit still for decades. In others, hyperactivity is a more normal state. Today we’re looking at the 2020s poster child for higher education hyperactivity. It’s not the usual suspects, the UK or Australia, it’s little New Zealand where we’re making our fourth stop on this podcast in just over two and a half years. When last we were in Wellington, we talked to Chris Whelan from Universities New Zealand about university

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Provincial Budgets 2025-26

Ok everyone, all the provincial budgets are in and so it’s time for our annual look at what another round of irresponsible pan-partisan political leadership has wrought for our sector for the next twelve months. Figure 1 shows the province-by-province breakdown of this year’s budgets, showing the change in transfers to institutions in real dollars over 1 year and 5 years for each of the ten provinces. In most provinces, collecting this data is pretty easy—you just look at the

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Opportunity and Talent

On the day of the federal election, the Globe came out with a list of eight “fateful issues” that Canada’s next Prime Minister (Mark Carney, as we now know) would have to face. I’ve read it a couple of times now and what strikes me most is not that the list is wrong, per se, but that the framing is so desperately plodding and unimaginative. And we need some serious imagination right now. Let’s get down to specifics here: the eight areas

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The Deeper Meaning of Election 2025

So, it’s voting day. I am pretty sure the Liberals are going to win a stonking majority, but regardless of who wins, there are deeper shifts at work which the sector needs to take seriously. Before I start, though, I need to take time to acknowledge something that happened last Wednesday. If you recall, I spent quite a bit of time discussing how the Conservatives had been pulling back on the “wokeness” issue. A few hours after I published that, CBC

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Election 2025: The Conservative Party Manifesto

Ok, the Conservatives finally released their platform yesterday. It’s…thin…so far as postsecondary education goes. It’s absolutely nothing like the extremely detailed and nerdy platform in 2021 which, let us recall, was released on Day 1 of the campaign (I remain firm in my belief that an Erin O’Toole-led Conservative Party would be walking away with this election). And there are definitely no signs of a reversion to the Harper era and it’s too often unremarked interest in Big Science and investments in major research

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