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Category: Policy

A Great Day for Student Assistance

I was going to stay off the blog this whole week (I need a reading week, too!), but there was a budget in Ontario yesterday.  A weird and wonderful (if somewhat under-documented) budget, which is going to change the way we think about student aid, tuition, and affordability in Canada for decades to come. Here are the basics: all of Ontario’s different grants and loan remission programs are being merged together into one big up-front grant program (all the provincial

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February 26, 2016 7 Comments

Innovation Ecosystems: Promise and Opportunism

We sometimes think of innovation policy as being about generating better ideas through things like sponsored research.  And that’s certainly one part of it.  But if those ideas are generated in a vacuum, they go nowhere – making ideas spread faster is the second pillar of innovation policy (a third pillar – to the extent that innovation is about new product-generation – has to do with venture capital and regulatory environments, but we’ll leave those aside for now). Yesterday, I discussed why the key to speeding up

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December 8, 2015 2 Comments

The Higher Education of Heads of Government

To follow up on yesterday’s musings about the educational history of Canadian Prime Ministers: I think you can tell something about a country’s social structure just by looking at the clustering of leaders’ educational backgrounds. In this exercise, I look at the records for Canadian, British, Australian, Japanese, and New Zealand Prime Ministers, German Chancellors, and French and American Presidents.  I would have included Italy but politicians’ Wikipedia bios are weirdly silent on education (even in the Italian versions).  I

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December 1, 2015 1 Comment

A Ministry of Talent

My friend and colleague, Jamie Merisotis of the Lumina Foundation in the United States, recently wrote a book called America Needs Talent.  It’s a short, popularly-oriented account of how human capital drives the economy, and what countries and cities can do to acquire it.  One of the suggestions he makes is for a federal “Department of Talent”, which is intriguing as a thought experiment, if nothing else.  So let’s explore that idea for a moment. To begin, let’s be clear

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November 13, 2015 1 Comment

An Update on England’s Teaching Excellence Framework

Last week, the UK Minister for Business Innovation and Skills (which is responsible for higher education) released a green paper on higher ed.  It covered a lot of ground, most of which need not detain us here; I think I have a reasonable grasp of my readers’ interests, and my guess is that the number of you who have serious views about whether the Office For Fair Access should be merged into a new Office for Students, along with the

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November 10, 2015 2 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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