The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Politics

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

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

Read More »
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,

Read More »
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

Read More »
March 8, 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...