Over the past few weeks, a weird idea has been emanating from Ottawa: a hard cap on student visa numbers. This is a pretty foolish idea, as even a cursory examination of the issue will show. It’s not entirely impossible – there is a narrow way to make it work – but I absolutely do not trust the present federal government to pull it off. First, let’s start with why people think a cap on student visas is necessary. As
Occasionally, I get asked about why higher education will look like in forty or fifty years. I usually beg off this kind of thing because predictions over that length of time aren’t very meaningful. I mean, will AI have an effect? Of course it will. Can I predict what it is? Of course not. Don’t be ridiculous. And yet. There are a couple of important things that we can say, with little fear of contradiction, about the future environment in
Last week, the good folks of Alberta elected a United Conservative Party government for the next four years. What does that mean for post-secondary education? First, I think it’s a pretty good bet that – on the university side at least – we will continue to see more episodes of culture war nonsense along the lines of what we saw in Lethbridge last year. Universities are kind of the epitome of the “effete lefty” culture that UCP likes to believe
Alberta goes to the polls next Monday, so it’s time for another edition of “check out those election promises”. I’ll restrict my comments to the New Democratic Party (NDP) and the United Conservative Party (UCP) since those are the only parties likely to win seats or crack 3% of the vote (yes, yes, the Alberta Party – colour me unconvinced). You can see the New Democratic Party Platform here. It’s not quite a platform in the traditional sense of having
Let me start with three comments/conversations I’ve seen and had in the past little while. Those are all interesting observations on their own but let’s think about the implications of the three comments together. In other words, institutions have two choices. First, they can wait for brief moments when the political system allows politicians to ignore the short-term interests of donors and hit them hard. Or, second, they can exert themselves to try to make institutions like universities and colleges
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