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Category: Politics

Scenario Planning Outside Ontario and Quebec

After a one day hiatus, we’re back to the topic of scenario planning.  You’ll recall that on Wednesday, I showed some pretty pessimistic projections for what could happen to university financing in Quebec and Ontario.  Today, I have some better news for people in seven of the eight other provinces: your futures aren’t nearly so disastrous. When scenario-planning at the provincial level, four things matter: 1)      The forecast for nominal GDP.  Over the long-run, government budgets tend to remain pretty stable

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October 24, 2014 No Comments

Free Tuition in Chile

Last fall, Michelle Bachelet was once again elected as President of Chile, on a considerably more radical platform than that which propelled her to the same position eight years earlier.  One of her many campaign promises was to make higher education completely free.  This is a Big Deal.  It’s not like Germany, where tuition was only ever a derisory sum; in Chile, tuition payments are equal to 2% of GDP, a larger percentage than anywhere else in the world, outside

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October 15, 2014 No Comments

Remembering the Axworthy Green Paper

It was 20 years ago today that then-Human Resources Minister Lloyd Axworthy presented the findings from his long-awaited “Green Paper” on social security to the House of Commons (the paper itself was released the day before, on October 5, 1994).  The back-drop:  Lucien Bouchard was leader of the opposition, Jacques Parizeau was the new Premier of Quebec, and we were on track for a referendum the following year.  Unemployment was over 10 percent; for youth, it was 20 percent.  Our

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October 6, 2014 No Comments

Aquamarine

I went on a bit of a bender this summer reading histories of Canadian universities, and I really enjoyed them all.  Hugh Johnston’ Radical Campus, a history of Simon Fraser’s frankly batty early years was probably the most interesting, but I also quite enjoyed histories from Manitoba, Carleton, and Bishop’s. But I wanted to tell you my absolute favourite story from my summer reading, which concerns the creation of the Atlantic Veterinary College. It comes from the pages of that institution’s

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October 3, 2014 3 Comments

Too Big to Fail?

Here’s a serious question: are universities too big to fail?  And if so, what are the consequences of that? If we had a fully public system, with tight government oversight on budgets, and no deficit spending – sort of like what much of continental Europe has – this wouldn’t be an issue.  By definition, public institutions couldn’t fail (though presumably a government would be free to close an institution should it wish to do so).   But the existence of institutional

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October 2, 2014 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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