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Category: Politics

UK Election Promises

The UK goes to the polls on Thursday.  There are one or two things of higher importance at stake than higher education (mainly: which party gets to drive the entire country off a cliff and at what speed), but it’s still worth looking at what ideas are bouncing around over on the other side of the pond.  Fees and funding are essentially the same issue in the UK, because so much of universities’ income is tied up in domestic student

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December 10, 2019 1 Comment

PSE in Alberta – Part 2

Yesterday, we looked at the history of post-secondary education in Alberta; today, I want to look more at some of the data on finances and student numbers, just to give you all a better sense of how the province compares to the rest of Canada. Let’s start with tuition fees.  For the last quarter-century or so, Alberta has stayed pretty close to the Canadian average.  Until 2013-14 it was above the average; since then, it has been below.  But the

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November 29, 2019 7 Comments

Beyond the Student Choice Initiative

Last Thursday, the Ontario Superior Court struck down the Ford Government’s “Student Choice Initiative”, a program of voluntary student-unionism (VSU) it imposed last January (see here for a refresher).  The court decision is here.  It’s a full defeat for the provincial government, the policy is declared void, but it’s unclear if and how student organizations will be compensated for lost revenue from the fall term. A lot of people are arguing this is a victory for student unions and for the cause of

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November 27, 2019 No Comments

That Alberta Budget

Alberta has long been a fiscal outlier in Canada. It is by some distance Canada’s richest province (in the sense that household incomes per capita are the highest) and its provincial governments—mostly Conservative, but with a New Democrat interlude between 2015 and 2019—have long provided Albertans with public services to match. However, the one thing the Alberta government refuses to do is impose a sales tax or even a particularly imposing regime of personal taxes, preferring instead to ride the

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October 25, 2019 3 Comments

2019 PSE Platforms-Conservative Party

The Conservative Party is sometimes unfairly maligned when it comes to higher education.  Virtually no one, for instance, gave the Harper government credit for the quite stunning amount of money it spent on research during its first two terms, preferring to focus instead on the slow erosion of funding during its third term (during which time, it should be recalled, the party was trying to bring down an enormous post-financial crisis deficit).  Or the fact that it chose not to just

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October 8, 2019 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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