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Category: Policy

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

Human Capital Theory

My work exists at the junction of a few different fields – management, public administration, sociology and economics (which is kind of funny because my degree is in none of those things) – all of which have their own specialized jargon.  One of more jargon-y terms that I know I use a lot is “human capital”, a term which often seems to be misconstrued.  So, I thought I would give an explanation a shot. The OECD definition of human capital,

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May 9, 2018 No Comments

Five Approaches to Subsidizing Students

Specialists sometimes like to talk as if post-secondary funding is some kind of arcane science.  But if you cut to the chase, it’s actually pretty simple.  You can tinker around the edges, and you can use different techniques to fund different parts of the system, but fundamentally there are only these five approaches: Subsidize nothing.  Some education is private and does not attract any subsidy.  In fact, in large swathes of Asia, Africa and Latin America (not to mention about

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April 12, 2018 1 Comment

The Canadian IT Sector: From Self-Hype to Self-Pity

The Canadian tech sector has two modes: self-hype and self-pity.  Neither is very pretty. You may recently have seen articles floating around the internet talking about how great Canada is as a tech destination, how Canada is “winning”/ can “win” the AI race (whatever the hell that is supposed to mean – the verb “to win” takes on vast new meanings in these articles).  There’s been one every two weeks or so, often from big American magazines, for the last

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March 27, 2018 No Comments

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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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