Category: Universities

New Digital Universities

Last week Tony Bates, arguably the doyen of Canadian digital education, posted an intriguing little article called Why Canada Needs Five New Digital Universities on his blog at the Contact North website. Basically, Bates’ argument is that the future of learning is hybridized learning – that is a mix of face-to-face and online learning – though we don’t yet know exactly how best to mix those two to achieve best results for different learners at different levels in different subjects.  Not only

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Canada’s Most Iconic University Building

Recently, someone asked me what I thought Canada’s most iconic university building was.  That is, which building is a) instantly recognizable and b) utterly representative of the campus on which it sits?  I put the question out on twitter and got some interesting answers from my excellent and disputatious followers. The question, of course, is to some degree an unfair one because to be instantly recognizable, the university itself needs to be fairly well-known.  That condition makes it difficult for

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Good Lord Cape Breton

Last week, I got an email from the Atlantic Association of Universities.  “Great news!” it said.  “Enrollment in Atlantic Canadian universities rose by 2.4% last year!”  That’s pretty good, I thought to myself,  given the demographic crunch and all.  So, I clicked through on the document to get to where I can see the institution-by-institution data (I always do this, because it’s always good to see how your clients are doing.) Hm…OK, NSCAD up 8.3%, that’s good (guess our work

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History of Canadian PSE Part II (to 1940)

If you look at the history of Canadian post-secondary education, there are two particularly notable things going on with respect to the first four decades of the twentieth century.  The first is that western Canada got universities.  And the second is that Eastern universities entered into contracts with the state. East of Winnipeg, very few new universities were created in this period.  Newfoundland (not yet part of Canada) created Memorial University after WWI, and Mount Saint Vincent and Saint Thomas

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Comparing College and University Funding

[the_ad id=”11745″] While I was putting together The State of Post-Secondary Education, 2018 I did a simple comparison looking at provincial government funding for universities and colleges, using data from FIUC and FINCOL (the Statscan surveys of the finances of universities and colleges, respectively)  Here’s what I found: Figure 1: Provincial Government Funding per Full-time Equivalent Student, 2015-16 I had a hard time believing this relatively small gap was actually true: everybody knows universities get more money from governments than colleges, right? But I

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