The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Politics

The Age of Volatility

Morning all.  Yes, the summer is over and classes are returning, but fortunately your daily intake of higher education commentary/snark/contrarianism is back as well.  I missed you guys, too. Anyways, welcome to the 2022-23 academic year.  This was supposed to be the year we got back to “normal”.  And the occasional campus mask mandate aside (which I fully approve), on the surface maybe this year will feel a bit 2019-ish.  But if you look underneath the hood, things are not

Read More »
August 29, 2022 2 Comments

The “Higher Education” Premiers of the 21st Century.

Quick, fun exercise: who are the top “Higher Education Premiers” of the 21st Century?  Let’s define this as simply the Premiers who made the largest investments in the sector (my criteria here is biggest increase over any four-year period – otherwise premiers with long tenures tend to get penalized).  Go ahead, write down your top four right now before I walk you through the data.  Anyone who guesses number 1 gets a gold star because I sure as hell didn’t guess

Read More »
June 6, 2022 1 Comment

Ontario Provincial Election Manifestos 2022

Thursday is election day in Ontario and somehow, a Conservative government that spent the last two and a half years managing the pandemic with a clownish and occasionally malevolent incompetence seems poised to win another four years with a majority government.  Still: I do these manifesto reviews come hell or high water, so here we go. Let’s start with the fact that the NDP and Greens both agree that the Ford cuts to OSAP need to be reversed, all three

Read More »
May 31, 2022 No Comments

America’s Student Debt Cancellation Morass

It has now been something on the order of 26 months since anyone in the United States has been required to make payments their student loans.  As in Canada, these payments were suspended at the outset of the pandemic.  But whereas in Canada repayments re-started after about six months (Oct 1, 2020), in the United States they have yet to do so.  Understanding why gets us all a little closer to understanding the disfunction that is the American Higher Education

Read More »
May 26, 2022 2 Comments

Northern Post-secondary Education

Though it passed mostly un-noticed south of 60, the Task Force on Northern Post-Secondary Education issued its final report at the end of March.  It’s worth taking a bit of time to examine and reflect on what it says. Most of the report is concerned with the documentation of barriers to the growth of higher education in the North, as recounted through public consultations and a literature review.  And these challenges are substantial: the K-12 pipeline is much weaker than

Read More »
May 17, 2022 1 Comment

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.

Subscribe

Search Posts

Search Publications

Social Media

Linkedin Youtube Spotify

Recent Posts

More thoughts on...