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Category: Policy

Private Returns, Heterogeneous Products, and Insurance Markets

My last blog post on university tuition – which said that higher education has both public and private returns and charges should be arranged commensurate with the latter – seems to have sparked a variety of responses by email and on the blog.  Some of you were trolling, I think, or playing devil’s advocate, anyway. Others had serious objections.  Regardless, the counter-arguments essentially came in two varieties, and I want to take a moment today to answer both. The “But-lower-levels-of-education-have-private-returns-too-so-why-not-charge-for-K-12?”

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November 3, 2017 No Comments

New Data on Equity and Inclusion?

So, you may have read something last week (perhaps this piece from the Globe and Mail) about Universities Canada’s members all getting together to sign up for a set of Principles on Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, and an associated Action Plan on Inclusive Excellence.  There is lots of good stuff in these documents, and the promise made by Universities Canada to make public demographic data on faculty, staff and students.  But, a warning: there may be less to this than meets the eye.

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November 1, 2017 1 Comment

A Report So Stupid Only a “Thought Leader” Could Have Written It

The week before last, Deloitte – that redoubtable home for “Big Thinking” management consultant types who are nevertheless not big-enough-thinking for McKinsey – released a paper entitled The Intelligence Revolution: Future Proofing Canada’s Workforce.  To call it as dumb as a bag of hammers would be deeply unfair to hand tools.  Do you remember Otto, Kevin Kline’s character from A Fish Called Wanda?  The one who thought he was an intellectual despite his evident vacuity?  This paper is the literary embodiment of Otto.

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October 30, 2017 5 Comments

The Unfolding Disaster of the Liberals’ Innovation Policy

This Government, man.  It is something else. Today, the Hon. Navdeep Bains, Minister of Shaking Hands With Tech Executives, is in Halifax to – are you ready for this? – kick off a nationwide tour to announce the shortlist of the Superclusters competition.  Yes, the man has decided that it’s a good use of public money to spend the Parliamentary recess week jetting from one-part of the country to another announcing not the winners of this jumped-up contest but the shortlist. 

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October 10, 2017 2 Comments

NDP Leadership Race Notes

So the deadline to sign up for the federal NDP leadership passed a couple of weeks ago, and the first deadline for the mail-in ballots is next Monday.  So what to make of the four candidates and their views on post-secondary education?   Based on their platforms and a series of responses to a questionnaire on Science policy from Evidence for Democracy (responses available here), my take is as follows: Jagmeet Singh.  Nothing.  He has a lot of policy proposals on various topics

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September 12, 2017 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.

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