Category: Institutions

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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Universities on Fire

On this week’s episode of The World of Higher Education Podcast, Bryan Alexander joins us to talk about his new book, Universities on Fire, Higher Education in the Climate Crisis, which was published in March by Johns Hopkins University Press. Climate crisis books are a dime a dozen. This book is one of the few that looks at climate action through the lens of a particular economic sector or set of actors, in this case, our own sector of universities

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Historical Higher Education Data-Palooza Part 3

So it seems a lot of you were pretty interested in last week’s data fest and in particular this graph (of which I am inordinately proud, ‘cos damn it took some work). Figure 1: Total Government Transfers to Institutions by Source and Type, Canada, 1955-56 to 2020-21, in millions of $2022. The big story here is that institutional income in post-secondary education has grown much faster from 1999 onwards than it did at any time in the preceding 30 years. 

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