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Category: Politics

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

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May 17, 2022 1 Comment

The Reckoning

I am calling it now: Canadian post-secondary institutions are very close to the end of the road on international student number growth.  It’s not because demand is going to dry up or anything like that.  There is still room for hundreds of thousands more international students if we wanted them, and probably demand to match as well.  It is simply that too many institutions have become too greedy, and they are imposing intolerable externalities on their surrounding communities.  A backlash

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May 9, 2022 1 Comment

La loi 32

Come.  Let us speak together, honestly, about Loi 32, An Act Respecting Academic Freedom in the University Sector in Quebec.  Because it sets a new standard both in government interference in universities and in all-around sheer holy-crap-this-is-what-public-policy-is being-reduced to. If you read the law itself – and please do so, it’s short and only takes a minute or so –  you’ll see that for the most part it is pretty bland.  The meat of it, in articles 4 and 5,

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April 13, 2022 2 Comments

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

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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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