The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Institutions

New Strategy in Manitoba

To Winnipeg, where the provincial government suddenly seems to be taking postsecondary education seriously.  Yes, recent years haven’t been great – a vindictive Premier ousting a fantastic college President because he used to work for the NDP, or mooting a cut in post-secondary finances so nonsensical that even the Province’s overwhelmingly Tory business community told the government to get real, thus forcing a U-Turn.  But now the government seems to be heading down a different path.  For starters, it has pulled postsecondary education out

Read More »
February 18, 2021 No Comments

Fall 2021

I see some institutions are starting to make decisions about the Fall 2021 term.  Warning: my take is probably going to upset some people.  But for reasons I will describe below, I believe very strongly that Canadian PSE institutions will likely look ridiculous if they do anything other than a near-complete return to in-person teaching for the fall. I know, I know, I was one of the voices pushing ultra-caution last year.  And I know, people feel like it’s still

Read More »
February 17, 2021 4 Comments

Laurentian Blues (4) – Who is Next?

Note: since the publication of this post, Concordia University and St. Thomas University have provided responses disagreeing with the assessment of this post. Click the university names above to read their respective positions. So, the mixed metaphor I keep hearing is that Laurentian is the canary in the coal mine, and there must be other dominoes ready to fall.  And people seem to assume I know who is next.  In fact, my priors are that there are probably not any

Read More »
February 9, 2021 1 Comment

Laurentian Blues (3) – Hillary Redux

OK, before I get to the actual blog here, some updates on Laurentian: 1)      On Friday, Laurentian published its list of creditors.  It listed $184 million in potential debts, plus a couple of hundred small suppliers with amounts listed as “TBD”.  This is presumably the origin of the comment last Monday from an un-named source indicating they opened the books and instead of $100 m in debt it’s closer to $200 m.  But this is somewhat misleading: about $52m is for various

Read More »
February 8, 2021 5 Comments

Laurentian Blues (2)

I want to go into more detail on Laurentian, digging into finances, and correcting one or two things I got wrong yesterday. An unfortunate amount of time is going to be spent dragging Laurentian for bad data practices, but that can’t be helped. Let’s go back to this graph I showed yesterday. With a little bit more digging, I see that Laurentian claims that there were about $8 million in outstanding deficits prior to 2012-13, and that they are claiming

Read More »
February 4, 2021 12 Comments
Load More

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...