Category: Universities

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

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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

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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

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HESA’s AI Observatory: What’s new in higher education (December 1, 2024)

Spotlight Good evening, In my last AI blog, I wrote about the recent launch of the Canadian AI Safety Institute, and other AISIs around the world. I also mentioned that I was looking forward to learn more about what would be discussed during the International Network for AI Safety meeting that would take place on November 20th-21st. Well, here’s the gist of it. Representatives from Australia, Canada, the European Commission, France, Japan, Kenya, the Republic of Korea, Singapore, the UK

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HESA’s AI Observatory: What’s new in higher education (November 16, 2024)

Spotlight Good morning all,  You might remember the $2.4B announcement made by the federal government last April for the implementation of a series of measures meant to Strengthen Canada’s AI Advantage. (If you don’t, or if you’d like a refresher, you can read about it in our Budget 2024 Commentary). Within those $2.4B, $50M were earmarked for the creation of a Safety Institute. While this announcement was generally well received by our Canadian AI godfathers, little information was available at that

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