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Category: Colleges and Polytechnics

This Should Be Interesting

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

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January 29, 2013 No Comments

American College Sports

You may have heard something last week about a new report from the Delta Cost Project, in the United States.  Typically, I’m a big fan of the Delta Cost Project, but I think this particular study misses the point. The main line of argumentation against college sports in the US is that only a few big schools actually make money on athletics; on the whole, schools lose money, which could otherwise be spent on academics.  While true, this point could

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January 24, 2013 No Comments

Manageable Debt

One of the big questions in student loans these days concerns “manageable debt”.  How much debt is manageable, exactly?  And how do we best help borrowers whose debt is unmanageable? As nearly everyone agrees, manageable debt is a flexible concept. For someone with no income, pretty much any amount of debt is unmanageable.  As income rises, however, an increasing amount of debt can be serviced.   Interest rates and repayment terms matter too, of course;  any established debt-to-income ratio is a

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December 10, 2012 No Comments

Measuring Graduate Quality

A few months ago, I was in a discussion with a number of colleagues about how one should go about measuring how well universities and colleges prepare students for the labour market. It’s a tough question to answer. Employment rates aren’t helpful because those move with the economic cycle (and in places like Alberta with tight labour markets, low unemployment might be more of a sign of desperation for warm bodies than it is of educational quality). Employer satisfaction surveys

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May 24, 2012 No Comments

Canada’s Universities of Applied Sciences

We tend to think of institutions as being either “universities” or “colleges.” The former are thought of as primarily granting four-year degrees that cover a breadth of traditional options (and in larger institutions graduate degrees as well), focussing on more theoretical programs and advanced research. The latter, by contrast, are institutions that specialize in shorter-length certificates and diplomas that have a much more applied focus, tied very closely to specific skills and careers. Increasingly, though, Canada is seeing the development

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March 8, 2012 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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