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Category: History Lesson

Cockroaches

One of the most maddening things about higher education journalism is the widespread assumption of fragility. Take the notion of vulnerability to technological disruption.  The most recent example of this is a piece from University World News (which really should know better) entitled “Can Universities Survive the Digital Age?”  It’s an absolutely ridiculous question that could only be posed by someone who knew virtually nothing of the history of universities. Every time there’s a technological innovation, somebody thinks the university

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November 3, 2014 5 Comments

Aquamarine

I went on a bit of a bender this summer reading histories of Canadian universities, and I really enjoyed them all.  Hugh Johnston’ Radical Campus, a history of Simon Fraser’s frankly batty early years was probably the most interesting, but I also quite enjoyed histories from Manitoba, Carleton, and Bishop’s. But I wanted to tell you my absolute favourite story from my summer reading, which concerns the creation of the Atlantic Veterinary College. It comes from the pages of that institution’s

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October 3, 2014 3 Comments

Trivia Time

This is normally the time of year when I award the “worst-back-to-school story” award.  But I’m not going to this year.  As a result either of this blog’s massive influence, or sheer bad luck, no pundit or op-ed writer wrote anything really stupid this year.  Really, the worst was this CBC credulous news story covering the CCPA’s latest nose-stretcher on tuition fees.  And while it’s needlessly sloppy on the part of the CBC journalist (Dude!  You couldn’t think of one

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September 16, 2014 No Comments

Bad Memory

Some really sobering stuff in a paper I just got from Statscan called, “Job Market Realities for Post-Secondary Graduates”.  Listen to this: “Graduates of a field with low unemployment and little underemployment were also likely to earn high salaries and be content with their jobs.  They were usually graduates of job-oriented fields such as engineering, teacher training, most health disciplines, business, computer science and some technologies.” “A more general education in subjects with little practical application often (leads) to a

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June 2, 2014 No Comments

Happy Birthday, Canada Student Loans Program (Part the Last)

For the first thirty or so years of its existence, the CSLP changed little, and was rarely the subject of any political attention.  The annual loan maxima drifted gradually upwards from its initial $1,000 per year, but the only real innovations were the introduction of interest relief (the nucleus of today’s Repayment Assistance Program) in 1984, and a short-lived, ill-advised experiment in administrative cost-recovery in 1990 – during which the government levied a 3% fee on loans to pay for overhead,

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April 15, 2014 No Comments

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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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