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Category: Politics

Getting Caught Up

Morning all. How was the summer? Mine was pretty good and included a whistle-stop tour of the top SEC schools (short version: Ole Miss in Oxford, MS is a treasure, U Alabama in Tuscaloosa is soulless and somewhat terrifying but if for some reason you find yourself there, eat at Dreamland BBQ). Here at HESA Towers our team of nine (!) is getting ready for a massive semester.  Tomorrow we release our second annual State of Post-Secondary Education in Canada (and yes,

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August 26, 2019 No Comments

The Affordability Thing

Very few things in higher education drive me quite as spare as the focus on “affordability” in higher education.  First of all, no one defines it properly.  When most people talk about affordability, they are using it as a synonym for price.  But this is nonsense because affordability is a ratio: price divided by ability to pay.  What is affordable for someone in Westmount or Tuxedo or North Van is quite different from what is affordable to someone from Verdun

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June 12, 2019 2 Comments

Trudeau vs. Harper

As we move inexorably towards a fall election (21 October, in case you’d forgotten), it is time to try to evaluate how well the present government has done on skills, science and higher education and how its record stacks up against its main competitor, the Conservative Party.  We obviously can’t do a manifesto analysis now because the Conservatives don’t have a manifesto yet (though frankly, this recent set of policy speeches by Andrew Scheer are less than encouraging).  However, while

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June 4, 2019 8 Comments

Policy Stasis in Australia

Saturday was election day in Australia, and pretty much everyone knew what was going to happen.  The clapped-out two-term Coalition (Liberal-National, i.e. right-wing) government, which was so internally faction-riven that it had three prime ministers in six years via a series of “spills” that Canadian political geeks find so thrilling: the smooth Malcolm Turnbull defenestrating the Jurassic Tony Abbott in 2015, and winning an election before being booted by caucus last fall and replaced by the somewhat more Conservative Scott

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May 21, 2019 No Comments

PEI Platform Analysis

Prince Edward Island goes to the polls tomorrow, and while it is Canada’s littlest province with an electorate 10% smaller than the University of Toronto’s student body (unbelievably, the provincial budget is actually 25% smaller), but this is a pan-Canadian blog and by God no provincial budget or election is too small for us at HESA Towers to cover.  So, buckle up to find out what the parties are offering. Let’s start with the NDP, who are not even remotely

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April 22, 2019 1 Comment

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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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