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Category: Policy

Carnage

Y’all may recall January 22nd, when federal Immigration Marc Miller slapped a national cap on international student visas which implied a 35% cut (but larger in Ontario) and effectively killed off the PPP industry for (mainly Ontario) community colleges. You may also recall September 16th, when Miller returned to say “surprise! Now the cap includes graduate students” and also made changes to the post-graduate work-visa program which are likely to obliterate colleges’ ability to recruit students (the guesses I am hearing from the

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October 16, 2024 19 Comments

HESA’s AI Observatory: What’s new in higher education (October 4, 2024)

Spotlight Good afternoon all,  About a month ago, the U15 released its guidance on the use of AI in academic teaching and learning (finally, dare I say): Navigating AI in Teaching and Learning: Values, Principles and Leading Practices. While nothing in there is truly groundbreaking – which might make one (me, for starters) wonder why it took them so long, two elements caught my eye.  1) The U15 emphasizes the importance of Building trust, saying “As we learn and gain

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October 4, 2024 No Comments

The Workload Conundrum

One of the weirdest things about Canadian academia is how workload is defined. You’ve probably heard somewhere that professorial workload is “40-40-20”, that is, 40% teaching, 40% research, and 20% “service.” But this is not an actual description of anyone’s actual workload, which can vary enormously from year to year, it’s more a kind of general rule of thumb, like the Chinese Communist Party’s adage that Mao was 70% good and 30% bad. It’s meant to be taken seriously but

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September 24, 2024 8 Comments

Marc Miller Strikes Again

On Monday last week, the Liberals got humiliated in a pair of by-elections in Quebec and Manitoba. In response, the Liberal party decided it needed to regain some popularity and that the best way of doing so was to kick universities and colleges a bit. And so the Minister of Immigration (and unofficial National Minister of Higher Education) Marc Miller announced a set of changes to study visas and post-graduation work visas. (How do I know this was a sudden, unplanned

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September 23, 2024 3 Comments

Eating the Future

As anyone who was alive at the time knows, if you want to pick a decade when Canada was at its nadir, it was the 1990s. We managed to have a currency crisis, a fiscal crisis, a national unity crisis, and a recession which basically lasted seven years. It was bleak, bleak, bleak. But in one very important way, it was better than today. Because at least, even though we were broke (both Saskatchewan and Newfoundland flirted with bankruptcy in

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September 9, 2024 5 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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