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Category: Media

What The Heck Did You THINK Was Going to Happen?

I’m a bit bewildered by some of the recent commentary about declining returns to education, most notably last week’s paper from CIBC on the subject.  While the actual report was not nearly as stupid as the ream of press coverage that followed it, it still had a few howlers, and definitely lacked critical thinking. First, the howlers.  1) The returns to Bachelor’s degrees are not declining; they are, in fact, growing at a slightly slower rate than at other levels of education,

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September 3, 2013 2 Comments

So, This Obama Plan, Then (Part 1)

Canadians have few – if any – original ideas when it comes to education.  Generally speaking, we tend to reuse American ideas a few years after the’ve gone viral down south.  But what with all these interwebs and the Twitter these days, the lag time on this is getting shorter and shorter.  That’s why it’s definitely worth paying close attention to the recent Obama initiative on college costs: there are a lot of themes in that plan which have resonance

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August 29, 2013 No Comments

Bingo!

I love back-to-school time: the joy, the energy, the sense of limitless possibilities.  It’s almost enough to make you forget about the tsunami of dreadful journalism that accompanies it. There are basically three reasons for bad back-to-school journalism.   First, higher education is complicated; it doesn’t lend itself to the simplistic narratives required for 800-word articles.  Second, there’s a serious lack of decent data about higher education in Canada, what with the Millennium Scholarship Foundation gone, HRSDC no longer funding any

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August 27, 2013 9 Comments

Coursera Jumps the Shark

Remember when Coursera – the world’s largest purveyor of Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) – was going to disrupt higher education, and put hundreds if not thousands of public institutions out of business? I know it’s hard to cast your mind back all of eighteen months, but try. Actually don’t.  Because it’s all over. Yesterday, Coursera did a weird strategy about-face by announcing that, rather than competing with public colleges, it’s going to start competing with Blackboard instead. We’ve been heading

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May 31, 2013 18 Comments

Enough with the Youth Declinism, Already

Can we please just stop with the “Generation Y are screwed” meme, already?  It’s utterly without foundation. Last week, the Canadian Press ran an article about a poll, which said that, due to inflated housing prices, 72% of Canadians aged 19-33 were pessimistic about ever owning a house.   This sounds terrible – until you look at the actual data. Census data shows that, in 2006, home ownership among 20-29 year olds was, in fact, at an all-time high.  True, the

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March 28, 2013 4 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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