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Category: Politics

A Reminder Why Education, Skills, and Training are Provincial Responsibilities

We’ve spent a lot of time over the past few years talking about skills, skilled trades, skilled personnel, BAs vs. welders, jobs without people/people without jobs, and all kinds of other nonsense about education, training, and the labour market.  And to a large extent, when we argue about this stuff (and I’m including myself here), we’re arguing based on national-level data. But the labor market isn’t national. A recent paper by Kelly Foley and David Green made this point quite

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March 28, 2014 2 Comments

Some Final Thoughts on German Apprenticeships

If you’ve been following our Minister of Employment and Social Development, Jason Kenney, lately, you’ll know that he’s taken a keen interest in German apprenticeships.  So much so that his office recently organized a study trip to Germany, to which various provincial education ministers and Ottawa association types were also invited. There are, basically, eight major differences between our system of apprenticeships and theirs. To wit: 1)      Our apprenticeship system is post-secondary, and caters to people in their 20s.  Theirs is

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March 26, 2014 1 Comment

March Madness

It’s March Madness in the US – the annual NCAA basketball tournament.  And so it’s time to ask the question: what the hell is it with Americans and intercollegiate sport, anyway? To most of the rest of the world, the American college sports industry – by which we mostly mean Men’s Basketball and Football – is flat-out ridiculous.  There are 420,000 student athletes.  Attendance at college football games is 48 million/year.  Total income for college sports is just under $11 billion

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March 24, 2014 4 Comments

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

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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