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Category: Media

The System Works

There has been much wailing these last couple of weeks about a “sensational” revelation made by Global News (and then again a couple of days later by CBC, as if Global didn’t exist, because that’s how media works) that the University of Waterloo admissions department has a special, secret list of high schools, indicating which ones seem to grade easier than others and also how to adjust grades from these schools so that they can judge applicants on a more or less common

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September 26, 2018 4 Comments

André Picard Shills for the One Percent

You may have heard about New York University’s appalling plan to make tuition free at its medical school.  This is, I am sure, a great gimmick to promote NYU among the upper classes of the Northeastern US.  But it is a terrible use of money.  The beneficiaries will come from BY FAR the most privileged stratum of society and once they graduate they will themselves join that same ludicrously privileged stratum.  If one were trying to design a post-secondary subsidy that was as regressive as

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August 31, 2018 No Comments

Never Let Facts Get in the Way of a Good Story

Just as I finish writing about the huge boom in STEM enrolments, along comes the Financial Post’s Diane Francis with a dumb-as-a-bag-of-hammers op-ed effectively arguing that international students are stealing all the spots in Science and Engineering. She contends that Canadian university STEM programs should only be for Canadian students because foreign students all return home and this leaves us defenceless in a world of massive technological change.  This article is such a grab-bag of bad arguments I decided to answer it immediately; the

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March 20, 2018 1 Comment

Nationalism and Higher Education

For fairly obvious reasons, nationalism has been on people’s minds in higher education lately.  Nationalist/populists are on the loose, and their values and policies appear to be inimical to those of higher education.  The standard higher education party line usually includes i) something about knowledge knowing no boundaries ii) some reference to the earliest universities in Italy where the student body was fully international and iii) something about building global understanding for peace/trade/development/whatever. And that’s all true as far as it

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December 5, 2017 No Comments

Has everybody lost their damn mind?

Some simple Q & As to clear up the present hysteria in Canadian Higher Education follow the sundry events at Wilfrid Laurier. Do Teaching Assistants have Academic Freedom?  No.  Academic Freedom is a protection of faculty rights based (at least in theory) on disciplinary competence.  TAs have rights of free speech of course, but those don’t protect your job if you annoy  your employer.  In this sense, Lindsay Shepherd probably had fewer rights as a TA than she would have

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November 27, 2017 22 Comments

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.

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