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Category: Policy

Smarter Policy on Apprenticeships

I’m pretty sick of the discourse around apprenticeships in Canada.  But that doesn’t mean I’m against apprenticeships; quite the opposite, actually.  I’d just like policy formation on the subject to revolve around something more intelligent than MOREMOREMOREWENEEDMORE. Instead of focussing the discussion entirely around intake rates, we could be having much more productive discussions about any of the following: 1.        How do we increase completion rates? Contra most of the rhetoric you hear, Canada’s apprenticeship intake rates are pretty good – and in

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March 4, 2014 12 Comments

Effective Higher Education Policy

Higher education, as a policy field, requires long-term thinking.  It’s not just because universities themselves are pretty slow to effect change: it’s because it genuinely can take years for policies to have an impact.  Want to improve research impact? You need to build new labs, hire new staff, perform research, do peer review, publish, do the knowledge mobilization, etc.  Want to “double the pipeline” to get better computer science grads?  That really means getting students to shift to heavier STEM

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March 3, 2014 4 Comments

What a Trudeau Education Policy Might Look Like

So, Justin Trudeau says one of his major policy priorities is to “put more money into education and training”.  As with all Liberal policies these days, it’s short on specifics, though whether that’s because he wants to participate in policy-making, or because he has either no clue/intention of giving Tories a target to shoot at, is unclear.  With the Liberal policy convention underway, it’s an opportune time to think about how a future Liberal government might deliver on this promise.

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February 21, 2014 No Comments

Why Can’t We Just Means-Test Tuition?

A couple of weeks ago, I had an exchange with a colleague who couldn’t figure out why tuition wasn’t means-tested.  It just makes sense, he said: make the rich kids pay lots of tuition, and make the poor kids pay very little. I argued that it was means-tested.  If you didn’t have means, you’d get a grant, which would reduce tuition (though I allowed that this was done a lot less effectively than it could be, given how poor our

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February 20, 2014 2 Comments

Chinese Higher Education: Where to From Here?

So, now that China has 30 million students and a half-dozen “world class universities”, where to next? Well, the first thing to note is that the system hasn’t finished growing.  While the major metropolitan areas of the north and centre have PSE attendance rates that approach those in Canada, outside of those very small areas, the average is less than half that.  Even in fairly prosperous coastal provinces like Zhejiang and Guangdong, participation rates are less than half of what

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February 14, 2014 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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