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Category: History Lesson

Happy 50th, CSLP (II): The Road not Taken

The Progressive Conservative Party under John Diefenbaker won a crushing majority in 1958, and his platform hadn’t contained anything with respect to education or universities.  Though he was known for his “Vision for Canada”, universities weren’t really a part of that vision.  He retained the Saint Laurent policy of paying money directly (via the AUCC) to individual universities on a more-or-less per capita basis.  The only change he made was to agree to a deal with the Duplessis government (which

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April 11, 2014 No Comments

Happy 50th Birthday, Canada Student Loans Program

The Canada Student Loans Program, which over the years has helped upwards of 3 million Canadians obtain a post-secondary education, turns 50 this year.  And since the Government of Canada seems to be either too shy or too partisan (it was a Liberal creation after all) to celebrate this anniversary, I thought I’d do it here, by spending a few days giving you a bit of history about how the program came about. (Why now?  Why not August 1st, the

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April 10, 2014 1 Comment

Chinese Higher Education’s Take-Off

When Deng re-opened the universities, the system somehow managed to pull together a couple of hundred thousand professors, and around 600 institutions started enrolling students.  By 1980 that meant about a million students a year in mainstream universities (plus another half-million in specialized “adult higher education institutions”), and a cozy student: faculty ratio of about 4:1.  Over the next decade, to 1990, those numbers would increase to about 2 million in universities (mostly in 4-year undergraduate programs known as Benke), another million

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February 7, 2014 3 Comments

The Crucible: Higher Education in the Mao/Deng Years

Chinese higher education wasn’t up to much during the Mao years.  After 12 years of war – with Japan from 1937 to 1945, and a civil war thereafter – there wasn’t a great deal left when the war was over.  Some universities relocated for the duration of hostilities, others closed and re-founded themselves in Taiwan after the Communists triumphed on the mainland.  Though the Communists oversaw a huge increase in basic schooling and literacy, higher education remained hampered by purges, famines,

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February 3, 2014 2 Comments

The Universities of Imperial China

Today kicks-off Chinese New Year, and so I wanted to devote some time to the subject of higher education in the People’s Republic of China.  Given the immensity of the topic, the usual one-off, “Better Know a Higher Ed System” piece seemed inadequate – hence, I’ve written a series of posts, which I’ll be publishing over the next 15 days (the duration of Lunar New Year celebrations).  Enjoy. *** China is one of the few places in the world that

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January 31, 2014 2 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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