Category: Institutions

Counting the Previously Uncounted

Morning all.  No podcast today: we had some scheduling difficulties that require us to switch up Monday’s blog to today, and the interview on Saudi Arabia with Annalisa Pavan to Monday.  Our apologies. Earlier this week, the good folks at Statscan released i) a pretty cool infographic about students in private post-secondary education in Canada and ii) a remarkably nerdy piece, technically a report on a “pilot project,” about how they came up with the numbers in the infographic.  Strangely, it didn’t publish

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The Far Future

Occasionally, I get asked about why higher education will look like in forty or fifty years.  I usually beg off this kind of thing because predictions over that length of time aren’t very meaningful.  I mean, will AI have an effect?  Of course it will.  Can I predict what it is?  Of course not.  Don’t be ridiculous. And yet.  There are a couple of important things that we can say, with little fear of contradiction, about the future environment in

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The Bailiffs Are at the Door

Just a short one today, because I am spending my Sunday on a flight to Almaty and have less time than usual to blog. Last month, I wrote “The Bill is Coming Due”.  It largely revolved around the theme that Canadian PSE institutions were too dependent on international students and that relatively minor failures in recruitment were now causing institutions real harm.  Also last month, I wrote about Ontario colleges and how they were killing the Golden Goose of international

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Ontario Colleges. Again.

Hi all.  Just a short note before getting into this blog post that we at HESA Towers are trying something a bit new.  On Thursday, we are hosting an online meeting for everyone across the country who is interested in institutional policies on teaching and learning with respect to AI programs based on Large Language Models.  Want to know how many institutions are seeing the issue mainly as a plagiarism problem and how many are seeing it as an opportunity

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The Bill is Coming Due

Though there are ups and downs and local variations, over the past decade, three factors characterize the finances of the Canadian higher education sector. That’s it, that’s the whole story.    It’s a classic triangle: if one side increases in length and another one does not move, the entirety of the accommodation lies on the third side of the triangle. Now, to be fair, at the system-level this dynamic seems to work.  On average, the system is chugging along reasonably, with

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