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Category: Colleges and Polytechnics

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

Funding Polytechnics v. Funding Universities

Recently, a colleague asked me how big I thought the gap in funding was between polytechnics and universities.  My hunch was that universities were certainly better funded if you include all sources of income, but that if you just looked at core provincial government funding, the gap might not be so large.  So, for giggles, I decided to try to compare the two. Due to the complexity of various funding mechanisms and – especially – the difference in the nature

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February 7, 2018 1 Comment

Canada’s Secret Weapon against Inequality

Inequality is perhaps the great political issue of the 21st century (so far anyway).  And while Canada isn’t exactly a world-beater on this score, we do show up a heck of a lot better than some of our peers – say in the UK, France or certainly the US.  Despite lots of great work by people like Miles Corak, there’s no real agreement as to why this is: is it more robust social programs?  A more powerful union movement?  Our immigration

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January 22, 2018 2 Comments

College Revenues versus University Revenues

As you all know, I spend a lot of time analyzing university finances, mainly because the data is easy to get and is quite detailed (Canadian higher education statistics are disastrous in many ways, but one area where our stats are better than almost anywhere else in the world is our institutional financial reporting – the FIUC Survey is genuinely world-class).   But I normally don’t spend the same amount of time on community college, which is something I’d like to change starting

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January 18, 2018 1 Comment

Bad Numbers

I like to name and shame people who are playing fast and loose with numbers.  Usually, this involves taking one “true” data point and then using it to make a point which is unwarranted by the data in context.  A couple of examples caught my eye last week. First up: “Students have at most a 1 in 4 chance that the person at the front of the classroom is a full-time faculty member”. This is the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternative’s

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October 31, 2017 9 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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