Category: Policy

Visa Caps “Lite”

Last week, it was revealed that Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) is trending towards using “Trusted Institution Status” instead of caps on visas.*  The idea is not to decrease the number of visas overall, but to allow “trusted” institutions to access expedited visa processing.  Why is this important?  One, visa processing isn’t really a 12-month thing. Processing clusters during certain points of the year and IRCC doesn’t want to hire seasonal staff to compensate for these points. Two, several

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HESA’s AI Observatory: What’s new in higher education (Sept. 15th, 2023)

Spotlight Good afternoon all, In the planning of our series of AI Roundtable meetings, we at HESA towers are currently hoping to host a session on student perspectives during the month of November. We’d appreciate your help in connecting us with student leaders from your institutions that would be open to share their views on how AI is impacting higher education. We’re looking for diverse perspectives, including voices from graduate students. Let us know if you think of anyone by

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Caps on Student Visas

Over the past few weeks, a weird idea has been emanating from Ottawa: a hard cap on student visa numbers.  This is a pretty foolish idea, as even a cursory examination of the issue will show.  It’s not entirely impossible – there is a narrow way to make it work – but I absolutely do not trust the present federal government to pull it off. First, let’s start with why people think a cap on student visas is necessary.  As

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HESA’s AI Observatory: What’s new in higher education (Sept. 8th, 2023)

Spotlight Good afternoon all, I hope that the first week back on campus was a good one.  Earlier in August, we, at HESA towers, sent a survey to provosts and VPAs to get a better sense of where institutions were at with respect to building policies and guidelines regarding AI. (We’re still collecting answers, so if you had forgotten about it and it’s been lying around in your email box, you can still get to it.) From the early answers

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HESA’s AI Observatory: What’s new in higher education (Sept. 1st, 2023)

Spotlight Good afternoon all, Thanks so much to the 185 of you who joined us last Monday for our AI Roundtable meeting on Governance and policy. We’re encouraged by the continued strong interest on this issue and we’re pleased to continue hosting these sessions and populating our Observatory on AI Policies in Canadian Post-Secondary Education. It was striking in Monday’s session to hear the inter-institutional disparities with respect to the pace of policymaking. Some institutions are already working on developing

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