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Category: Politics

American Higher Education Under Trump

Tomorrow, Donald Trump will be sworn in as the 45th President of the United States (actually, the 44th person to be President: Grover Cleveland’s two non-consecutive terms screw up the count).  What does this mean for higher education? First off, let’s recollect that where higher education is concerned, the US, like Canada, is a federation where the main decisions about funding public education are made at the state level. Decreased state investment in institutions and consequent rises in tuition have

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January 19, 2017 No Comments

Post-Brexit Options

One highly amusing by-product of the frantic Canada-EU-Walloon trade negotiation finale last fall was watching the UK government suddenly realize that negotiating agreements with a 27-country trade bloc is actually really difficult and that this Brexit thing is almost certainly not going to end well.  Which of course has some reasonably significant implications for UK universities.  But how exposed are UK universities to Brexit? Arguably, the bigger post-Brexit implications have to do with staff who may be denied residency, future

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January 12, 2017 2 Comments

The “Poorly Educated” and the US Election

Morning all.  Hope you’ve been well. During the US election and its aftermath, a lot of the discussion has focused on the issue of education.  Specifically, many pollsters noted large shifts in favour of the democrats among college-educated whites and even larger shifts rightward from less-educated whites.  Trump’s statement in June that he “love(d) the poorly-educated” was in retrospect quite significant.  From this, many on the left have deduced that “education is more important than ever”, a statement which is

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November 21, 2016 No Comments

A Second Thought About Half-Way Through A Pretty Awful Day

Forgive the intrusion.  But our neighbour to the South electing a quasi-fascist narcissist isn’t an every day occasion.  There are some significant short-term consequences for Canadian higher education, and I thought I would just quickly enumerate them so that debate and preparation can begin. First, the chances of a recession in the next couple of years just shot up quite a bit.  Tearing up NAFTA also means tearing up the FTA: there will be a pause in business investment while

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November 9, 2016 2 Comments

Priorities

Next week, everyone’s favourite Federation of Students is going to have a “Day of Action” to demand “Free Education for All”.  A few months ago I explained why some student groups think it’s a good idea to be protesting right now even while governments are quite sympathetic to them  (tl:dr: it’s because Sticking It To The Man is more important that achieving practical results). Now to anyone who’s read this blog for more than once, it’s probably clear that I

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October 28, 2016 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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