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Category: Politics

Explaining the Alberta Budget (Again)

The Alberta Budget came out last week.  As usual, the way Alberta presents its numbers creates enormous confusion and scope for spin, so permit me to run through the numbers with you. Recall from last year’s explainer that in its annual budget, the government runs two sets of numbers on post-secondary education.  The first is a straightforward “Expense Vote by Program”: that is to say, what the government is actually spending.  The image below shows how that looked in the

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March 8, 2022 1 Comment

Enhancing Quality

We’ve got a provincial election in Ontario in something like 100 days (as if Omicron and Ukraine weren’t depressing enough), so I thought I would put out a policy suggestion with respect to higher education that all parties could follow, if they were so inclined.  Specifically, a suggestion with how to promote quality in universities. To give you a little bit of background, in Ontario “quality assurance” takes one of two forms.  If you are a new organization trying to

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February 24, 2022 2 Comments

Waiting for the Arbitrator

We are now on Day 23 of a strike at the University of Manitoba, where the two sides genuinely did not start all that far apart.  Binding arbitration looms.  How did it get to this point? To really understand what’s going on here, one must go back to 2016.  In that year, the University of Manitoba Faculty Association (UMFA) went on strike over a combination of governance and salary issues.  They ended up winning a good chunk of what they

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November 24, 2021 No Comments

Global Higher Education’s Post-COVID Future (4) – The Return of Politics

HESA recognizes the importance of the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation and the ongoing need to commit to actions that promote and enable real reconciliation. There are many organizations worthy of support including: Orange Shirt Society: https://www.orangeshirtday.org/Indian Residential School Survivors Society: https://www.irsss.ca/The Circle on Philanthropy and Aboriginal Peoples in Canada: https://www.the-circle.ca/ On Monday, I described some of the big changes of the past 18 months; Tuesday I discussed the first big future trend (“Funding Challenges Forever”), Wednesday the second (“New

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September 30, 2021 No Comments

Global Higher Education’s Post-COVID Future (1)

Back in July, I was kindly invited to a conference sponsored by the Perspektywy Foundation in Warsaw to give a talk about the future of global higher education after COVID.  Over this week, I want to recap that talk and provide some analysis about the main policy trends affecting higher education of the next few years.  Not all these trends will affect countries equally (for reasons that will become apparent) but I think they probably capture the biggest pieces of

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September 27, 2021 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.

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