It’s been awhile since we’ve taken a policy tour out west, but it’s time I think to take a look at what’s going on in Alberta, where the NDP government is past its midpoint and starting to work towards an election in 2019. One day, someone is going to write a fantastic political book about the Alberta NDP. This is a party that went from (essentially) nothing to government in the space of a few crazy weeks in 2015. They
The big news in Canada last week was the unveiling by the governing Liberals of a “National Housing Strategy”. Housing is a good policy file to watch for higher education policy types, because housing and higher education share a lot of qualities. This might not seem like an obvious policy analogy, but hear me out. Shelter, like higher education, is often viewed as a “right”, but it’s one where the base assumption is (in North America, anyway) is that it
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?”
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.
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.
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.
