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Category: Policy

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

What’s Left of the Bologna Process

Last week, Ministers responsible for higher education from the 48 countries, constituting the members of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), met in Paris for the regular triennial “Bologna Process Ministerial Conference”.  Which was odd, because the substantive bits of the Bologna Process have been over for about a decade now.  So, what were they talking about? Back in the day (20 years ago, to be exact), higher education across Europe was a hodge-podge of systems.  The French had initial

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May 30, 2018 1 Comment

FutureSkills Lab: Told You So.

A short one today because I’m still theoretically on vacation and have to catch a train (Nagano!) Remember that RFP I told you le tout Ottawa was talking about?  It’s out.  You can read it in all its glory here. Apparently, the government thinks there is some non-profit organization out there (provincial governments and for-profits are forbidden from bidding) which can do the following (quoted from the bid): Identify, analyze and measure trends in the labour market for in-demand skills over the short and

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May 25, 2018 1 Comment

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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