The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Policy

Why is the NDP so Bad on Student Aid?

Here’s a thing which has puzzled me for pretty much the entirety of my adult life: why is it that the New Democratic Party – in theory the party most likely to defend the marginalized – can’t come up with decent student aid policies?  Why is it that at every turn, they choose to embrace the policies that are the least equitable and effective? (Major caveat: I exempt the BC New Democrats from this analysis, because they mostly have their

Read More »
November 12, 2020 2 Comments

Post-Covid Fiscal Rebalancing

One of the weirder things about the present crisis is that we seem to be re-writing all the rules of federalism without even noticing it.  This will significantly affect the future of higher education. The most important changes have been with respect to the Canada Emergency Relief Benefit (CERB) and the Canada Emergency Student Benefit (CESB).  Though there have been ebbs and flows over the history of confederation, income support for the under-65s, absent a strong link to the labour force (i.e.

Read More »
April 28, 2020 No Comments

How to Make Policy

Take a ride with me.  First stop, London, England. UK university funding is handled by an intermediate institution known as the Office for Students (OfS).  The Government decides on the amount of money it wants to spend on higher education, and then the Office for Students decides how to distribute it.  Recently, the government decided to reduce operating funding slightly while giving a boost to capital spending.  How should the OfS respond? Intriguingly, it holds a public consultation.  It lays out

Read More »
February 12, 2020 2 Comments

Brookings Improves on Superclusters

A few weeks ago, the Brookings Institution – America’s oldest and possibly most influential think-tank – published a paper called The Case for Growth Centers: How to Spread Tech Innovation Across America.  The paper’s problematique is the narrow distribution of tech growth in the United States (my favourite factoid here is that 90% of the growth in the country’s 13 highest-tech industries occurred in just five metro areas: Boston, San Francisco, San Jose, San Diego and Seattle) and that for the good of

Read More »
January 30, 2020 No Comments

The New Federal Government

I know this seems a bit late because the election was almost three months ago, but unlike 2015, the victorious Liberals took their sweet time forming a government and it was not until mid-December, after this blog closed for the break, that it issued mandate letters to all its new Minsters.  But with those now completed and made public, we can begin to get a handle on how this minority Liberal government intends to govern with respect to PSE. Let’s

Read More »
January 7, 2020 No 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.

Subscribe

Search Posts

Search Publications

Social Media

Linkedin Youtube Spotify

Recent Posts

More thoughts on...