The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Institutions

Les Quinze Glorieuses: Understanding the History of Québec Universities (Part 1)

Over the past few months I have been reading quite a lot of history about Québec universities. And I am pretty blown away by the way that the entire system transmogrified itself in a very short space of time between (roughly) 1960 and 1975. Though expansion in that period was obviously substantial in other parts of Canada, I would argue that nowhere else was there anything like the degree of systemic change in the nature of universities that took place in

Read More »
January 20, 2025 No Comments

HESA’s AI Observatory: What’s new in higher education (January 17, 2025)

Spotlight Welcome back, readers!  2025 is most definitely starting on a high AI-wise, because we’re only two weeks in, and there are already some major new releases worth taking a look at. I’m sharing a TL;DR with you all below for two of these, in case you are still catching up with the start of the new semester and have not had a chance to keep up with everything happening in the sector.  The US Department of Education’s Office of Educational

Read More »
January 17, 2025 No Comments

Re-capturing the early 80s

Most of the time when I talk about the history of university financing, I show a chart that looks like this, showing that since 1980 government funding to the sector is up by a factor of about 2.3 after inflation over the last 40-odd years, while total funding is up by a factor of 3.6. Figure 1: Canadian University Income by source, 1979-80 to 2022-23, in billions of constant $2022 That’s just a straight up expression of how universities get

Read More »
January 15, 2025 No Comments

College Financials 2022-23

StatsCan dropped some college financial data over the XMAS holidays.  I know you guys are probably sick of this subject, but it’s still good to have some national data—even if it is eighteen months out of date and doesn’t really count the last frenzied months of the international student gold rush (aka “doing the Conestoga”).  But it does cover the year in which everyone now agrees student visa numbers “got out of control,” so there are some interesting things to

Read More »
January 13, 2025 No Comments

Credulous Nonsense on Colleges from the CBC

There are a lot of things to be furious about these days but let me tell you, one of the things to be upset about is the CBC taking crapulous pot-shots at the college sector for no reason whatsoever. I refer to the story posted between Christmas and New Year’s entitled India’s trafficking claims against Canadian colleges reveal ‘exploited’ immigration, experts say, which was a continuation of an earlier story entitled India alleges Canadian colleges linked to trafficking foreign students

Read More »
January 8, 2025 2 Comments

One Thought to Start Your Day

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.

Subscribe

Search Posts

Search Publications

Social Media

Linkedin Youtube Spotify

Recent Posts

More thoughts on...