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Category: Students

2018/19 Enrolment Data

Last Thursday was that frabjous day which every higher education nerd has pencilled into their calendar: where Statscan publishes post-secondary enrolment data and for one brief moment we go from having enrolment data which is 37 months out of date to a mere 25 months out of date.  Now, the big picture will be familiar to everyone who read The State of Post-Secondary Education in Canada, because I already went and got most of this data from institutional websites, but the

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December 1, 2020 1 Comment

Performance and Accountability in a Pandemic

It is a disappointing time for those of us who value accountability.  Governments across the country (outside the Atlantic, anyway) are failing us – badly – in their pandemic responses.  And yet, apparently there are no political consequences for their shameful performance and the accompanying body count.  The Ford and Legault governments, with close to 10,000 deaths between them, are rising high in the polls.  Because everyone (again, if you ignore the Atlantic provinces) is making similar pig-headed mistakes, everyone

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November 9, 2020 No Comments

Needed Research on Remote Teaching

We’re only a few weeks into the term, but there are two important phenomena going on that, in a sensible world, would be the subject of urgent inquiry by all Canadian institutions. (This is not, of course, a sensible world, but I’ll get back to that at the end of the blog). The first topic is: why exactly have so many international students enrolled for remote teaching this term?  We don’t have full numbers yet, and probably won’t for awhile, but

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October 1, 2020 2 Comments

Are the Kids All Right?

One of the best – and yet perhaps most confusing – ways to look at the current state of today’s students is to look at the Canadian version of the National College Health Assessment (NCHA) survey, which is done every three years.  I want to take you through a quick comparison of the 2013 and 2019 surveys (each of which were taken by tens of thousands of Canadian students, so it’s a good sample), because I think there is a

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September 3, 2020 1 Comment

Student Unions as Early Warning Systems

One of the things that marks out Canadian student unions from their counterparts in (say) the UK is the relative lack of emphasis unions put on advocacy relating to academic quality.  For any student unions that want to change that, the next couple of weeks would be an unprecedented opportunity to do so. The remote semester has created a fundamental pickle for institutions, one which is baked very deeply into the fabric of Canadian academia.  Namely, while universities have the responsibility of attracting

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September 1, 2020 No Comments

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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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