The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Politics

Polling (Part 1)

It’s election time and so – surprise, surprise – there is a lot of polling out there telling people who is going to vote for whom.  Tomorrow, I will talk about polling specific to post-secondary education and science, but today, I want to talk more generally about how polling frames election issues and how poor some of the framing seems to be going into this election. In the pre-writ period, the most important question in polling is “what is the

Read More »
September 5, 2019 No Comments

The Liberal Record

Though the writs won’t be issued for another few days, we are already deep into the election run-up. Over the course of the next few weeks I will be giving you some analysis of the various party platforms with respect to higher education. However, before we get to platforms, it’s worth taking a look back at the record of the current government. To break down their performance, let’s start by examining whether the Liberals actually delivered on their promises from

Read More »
September 4, 2019 1 Comment

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,

Read More »
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

Read More »
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

Read More »
June 4, 2019 8 Comments
Load More

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...