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Category: Politics

A Dreadful Book About Higher Education

If, for some reason, you feel a need to read the literary equivalent of sticking knitting needles in your eyes, have I got a book for you:  Henry Giroux’s, Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education.  The whole book is a mixture of baseless assertions, generalizations from anecdotes, and non-existent fact-checking, an unmitigated disaster from start to finish. If you’re going to have an entire book about neoliberalism, it helps to actually define the term.  What is this thing that’s at war with

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March 20, 2014 6 Comments

Effective Higher Education Policy

Higher education, as a policy field, requires long-term thinking.  It’s not just because universities themselves are pretty slow to effect change: it’s because it genuinely can take years for policies to have an impact.  Want to improve research impact? You need to build new labs, hire new staff, perform research, do peer review, publish, do the knowledge mobilization, etc.  Want to “double the pipeline” to get better computer science grads?  That really means getting students to shift to heavier STEM

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March 3, 2014 4 Comments

What a Trudeau Education Policy Might Look Like

So, Justin Trudeau says one of his major policy priorities is to “put more money into education and training”.  As with all Liberal policies these days, it’s short on specifics, though whether that’s because he wants to participate in policy-making, or because he has either no clue/intention of giving Tories a target to shoot at, is unclear.  With the Liberal policy convention underway, it’s an opportune time to think about how a future Liberal government might deliver on this promise.

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February 21, 2014 No Comments

Why Can’t We Just Means-Test Tuition?

A couple of weeks ago, I had an exchange with a colleague who couldn’t figure out why tuition wasn’t means-tested.  It just makes sense, he said: make the rich kids pay lots of tuition, and make the poor kids pay very little. I argued that it was means-tested.  If you didn’t have means, you’d get a grant, which would reduce tuition (though I allowed that this was done a lot less effectively than it could be, given how poor our

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February 20, 2014 2 Comments

The Canada Apprentice Loan

One of the signature pieces in last week’s budget was the Canada Apprentice Loan (CAL).  Very few details were given out at the time (see p. 70 in the budget, here), but what details did emerge suggest two things to me: first, that the idea went into the budget less-than-fully-baked; and second, that it could turn out to be a fairly significant political mess. The proof of this being less-than-fully-baked is the lack of detail surrounding the idea.  While the

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February 18, 2014 9 Comments

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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