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Category: Media

Did CIBC Really Just Call for Lower Tuition?

Last week, HuffPost ran a story highlighting a newsletter from CIBC Economics about higher education.  It was actually a pretty meandering letter (CIBC Economics pieces on higher education are usually notable for their interesting use of data and somewhat shallow understanding of actual policy – here’s an earlier example).  The newsletter touched on a number of issues around educational supply and demand, but what HuffPost glommed on to was what a point about tuition in STEM programs and led with the headline “CIBC argues against

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September 5, 2017 No Comments

Why we should – and shouldn’t – pay attention to World Rankings

The father of modern university rankings is James McKeen Cattell, a well-known early 20th-century psychologist, scientific editor (he ran the journals Science and Psychological Review) and eugenecist.  In 1903, he began publishing American Men of Science, a semi-regular rating of the country’s top scientists, as rated by university department chairs.  He then hit on the idea of counting how many of these scientists were graduates of the nation’s various universities.  Being a baseball enthusiast, it seemed completely natural to arrange these results top to

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June 9, 2017 2 Comments

Worst Higher Education Article of the Decade (So Far)

Stop the presses.  I have found the worst education article of the decade so far.  It is by Don & Alex Tapscott, and it is called The Blockchain Revolution and Higher Education. How dumb is it?  Solar-powered flashlight dumb.  Tripping over a cordless phone dumb. The problem is that because it’s Don Tapscott and he is – for reasons that are completely beyond me – treated as some kind of national gem, no one ever calls him on his deep wrongness

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March 21, 2017 2 Comments

Unit of Analysis

The Globe carried an op-ed last week from Ken Coates and Douglas Auld, who are writing a paper for the MacDonald Laurier institute on the evaluation of Canadian post-secondary institutions. At one level, it’s pretty innocuous (“we need better/clearer data”) but at another level I worry this approach is going to take us all down a rabbit hole. Or rather, two of them. The first rabbit hole is the whole “national approach” thing. Coates and Auld don’t make the argument

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September 21, 2016 2 Comments

Reminder: Hot Jobs and Hot Careers Never Last

There was an interesting piece in the National Post last week about unemployed professionals in the Alberta oil and gas industry.  In amidst the occasional whine about the oil industry being so unloved by the rest Canada, there is a serious article about what happens to people in specialized professions when the economic tide swings away from that profession.  Some quotes: Philip Mulder, spokesman for the Association of Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta (APEGA), said its geoscientists are faring badly in

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September 1, 2016 9 Comments

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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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