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Category: Policy

Time for a Talent Agenda

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been critical of cheap talk about “skills gaps”.   That doesn’t mean that I think business complaints about human resources are baseless; the calls of dissatisfaction are too loud and broad for that to be the case.  Business in many sectors has said loud and clear that it can’t get the workers it needs. The problem, I think, is that policymakers have concluded that the problem lies in the quantity of graduates in particular fields. 

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June 5, 2013 2 Comments

Revisiting the Looming Labour Shortage Theory (Part 2)

Yesterday, we saw that if one replaces a steady-state assumption about the work-habits of older workers, with a graph that extends recent trends in employment for that age demographic into the near future, then total employment projections rise by 2.1 million over 20 years, more or less wiping out the whole “future labour shortage” theory. Future Employment Rates, Based on Different Assumptions About Employment Rates Among Workers Over 55               So what are the

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May 15, 2013 No Comments

Revisiting the Looming Labour Shortage Theory

Various bits of labour market paranoia have been driving PSE policy lately.  The “skills shortage” is one – even if the case for its actual existence is pretty weak.  Another, though, is the broader idea that we’re about to hit a major labour shortage as boomer retirements… well, boom.  Time to explore that idea a bit. At the heart of the labour market shortage meme – popularized mainly by Rick Miner in papers such as, People Without Jobs, Jobs Without People, and Jobs of the Future – is the

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May 14, 2013 No Comments

If I were a Human Trafficker…

… I might be looking at Canadian immigration and student visa policies and thinking that there were some pretty nice loopholes to exploit. Because there are some fairly juicy ones out there. The most obvious loophole – which, in fairness, the government is already moving to close – is that student visas don’t currently require students to attend a particular institution. Hence the stories of students arriving but never attending a school, or of some Ontario institutions “stealing” visa students

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November 21, 2012 No Comments

Spousal Income

Over the past decade, successive Canadian governments have tried to give bigger and bigger breaks to parents through the student aid system. Loan eligibility has steadily been widened to richer and richer families by making expected parental contributions less onerous. But for some reason, no recent government has seen fit to change spousal contribution rates. Since the mid-1990s, this rate has been set at 80% of the spouse’s combined net income over a threshold which varies a bit by province

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November 7, 2012 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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