The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Politics

You Couldn’t Make It Up

This email is G-rated, so I can’t use the full range of sexual/scatological imagery needed to describe my true feelings about the Ontario government’s Tuition Rebate announcement last week. I’ll keep it to: I told you so. To recap, the Ontario Liberals made a not-particularly sensible election promise to give a 30% rebate tuition to full-time dependent students. But at least it involved giving some new money to low-income students, even if it came at the cost of providing a

Read More »
January 9, 2012 9 Comments

A Harper-ized Canada Student Loans Program

I rarely say this about a Jane Taber article, but her Christmas Eve piece on Prime Minister Harper’s stewarding of federal-provincial relations was mildly fascinating. Her thesis is that Harper is gradually starting to impose his vision of water-tight federalism and has a long-term plan to get the federal government to back off and let provinces get on with doing whatever they are supposed to do under Article 92 of the Constitution. So, what’s the impact on higher education? I

Read More »
January 4, 2012 1 Comment

Many Bolognas

I spent part of October in Bucharest at the Bologna Future of Higher Education conference, trying, as I always do at these things, to get my head around what is happening in European higher education. Part of the problem of trying to follow the Bologna Process is that there are many Bolognas that exist side by side. There is the “formal” Bologna – which is actually a crashing bore, unless you’re really into diploma supplements and qualifications frameworks and quality

Read More »
November 2, 2011 No Comments

By Their Actions Shall Ye Know Them

There are two ways of thinking about student unions. You can think of them as being (a) populated by idealists, who only want education for all, or you can think of them as (b) actual unions, prioritizing wins (financial and otherwise) for their members – who, let’s recall, tend to come from wealthier backgrounds than society as a whole – ahead of any other cause. With that in mind, let’s look at the some recent public statements from the Canadian

Read More »
September 22, 2011 2 Comments

The Manitoba Election

Just to show we’re not irretrievably Ontario-centric, we’ll be doing short snapshots of party platforms in all provinces with elections this fall. First up, my home province of Manitoba. Choices are stark in the only province to have shot its way into confederation: in the last 11 elections, only one has resulted in a minority government and only one resulted in the Conservatives and New Democrats combined receiving less than 85% of the seats. It’s one or the other (which

Read More »
September 15, 2011 No 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.

Subscribe

Search Posts

Search Publications

Social Media

Linkedin Youtube Spotify

Recent Posts

More thoughts on...