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Category: Policy

Speak of the Devil

Yesterday was one of those days when I completely lucked out.  There I was, having just published a piece on possible scenarios on what the Ontario government might do in post-secondary education, when suddenly various news outlets began reporting that a new tuition framework was due to be announced later this week.  And it was a doozy: according to the report, the Conservative government was planning on reducing tuition in all regulated programs (ie. excluding international students and the graduate and

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January 16, 2019 3 Comments

2003-04: The Historical Hinge of International Rankings

Cast your minds back, if you will, by about 15 years.  Paul Martin had yet to show us why great finance ministers make lousy Prime Ministers.  The ghastly CROCS fad was still three years away.  And in China, Professor Nian Cai Liu had just released the inaugural Academic Ranking of World Universities, known more colloquially as the Shanghai Rankings. While national rankings were old hat, the Shanghai Rankings’ global nature was something genuinely new.  The sadly-defunct magazine Asiaweek had tried

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December 6, 2018 2 Comments

Planning for a Recession

The United States is currently in its 113th month of consecutive economic expansion.  The all-time record is 120.  A trade-war-obsessed lunatic is in control of the White House, and earlier this year Congress approved maybe the most radical set of deficit-driven tax cuts ever proposed.  The likelihood that a recession hits the United States at some point in the next 24 months is thus exceedingly high. And when Americans sneeze, odds are strong Canada will catch a cold.  Which leads me

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October 2, 2018 No Comments

A PSE Agenda for an Ontario Conservative Government

The new Ontario Government doesn’t seem to have a lot of ideas around post-secondary education.  The only policy it has implemented to date is to give the go-ahead to plans drafted under the Liberals to get moving on a Francophone university in Toronto.  This project, as I have said before, has always been based on some deeply unrealistic assumptions, mainly that there is huge unmet demand for French-language education in southern Ontario that Glendon, Laurentian and Ottawa are too inattentive to have

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August 30, 2018 1 Comment

Post-Secondary Education, Skills, and Growth

Over the weekend, I’ve been doing two things: obsessing about who I am going to vote for in this godawful Ontario election, and reading about post-Soviet Russia (in particular, Stephen Kotkin’s Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000).  And these two things have got me thinking a lot about what makes for a good economy and a good society and the extent to which post-secondary education plays a role in all that. If there is one thing the twentieth century proved,

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June 4, 2018 2 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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