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Category: Politics

Memo to Minister Nicolaides

To: Demetrios Nicolaides, Minister of Advanced Education, Alberta From: That guy from HESA Towers Dear Minister, So, you have finally got to the end of the Alberta 2030 Process.  Congratulations!  The question now is: where do you go from here? When the UCP came to power, it had two fundamental aims with respect to higher education: reduce government expenditures to fit the province’s new post-oil-bust financial circumstances and make institutions more active partners in the province’s economic development.  Both were entirely

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January 21, 2021 No Comments

46

At noon eastern today, Joe Biden will take the Oath of Office and become the 46th President of the United States.  The Pumpkin Fascist may be out of our hair, at least for awhile, what with the pending bankruptcy, sexual assault charges, tax, bank and real estate fraud charges, the emoluments case, plus whatever charges he will face for his role in the Cosplay March on Rome earlier this month.  But the country still faces the task of getting out of

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January 20, 2021 No Comments

The Term Ahead

Welcome back.  Refreshed?  Me neither.  But the show must go on. I want to start the year by sketching out the key landmarks and themes of the next year, and by extension, what smart universities and colleges need to prepare for. Let’s start with vaccine rollout, because pretty much everything depends on that.  Things are mostly a mess at the moment: we have doses and they are not getting into arms as quickly as they should.  This makes little sense

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January 4, 2021 No Comments

The US Student Debt Cancellation Debate

If you follow US policy debates at all, you will probably over the last couple of years have noticed that the idea of student debt cancellation has become a totem of the progressive left.  With the election of Joe Biden two weeks ago (and again this week, after several recounts) this issue is coming centre-stage, with some kind of executive order on the matter being seen potentially as an “early win” for the new administration.  Below, I answer some of

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November 19, 2020 No Comments

Why is the NDP so Bad on Student Aid?

Here’s a thing which has puzzled me for pretty much the entirety of my adult life: why is it that the New Democratic Party – in theory the party most likely to defend the marginalized – can’t come up with decent student aid policies?  Why is it that at every turn, they choose to embrace the policies that are the least equitable and effective? (Major caveat: I exempt the BC New Democrats from this analysis, because they mostly have their

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November 12, 2020 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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