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Category: Students

The May Fourth Movement

Tomorrow is the fourth of May.  In North America, this day has jokingly become known as “Star Wars Day” (i.e. “May the Fourth Be With You”).  But in China, it has a very different meaning.  For it was one hundred years ago tomorrow that one of the most important students revolts of all time began. China held together just barely after the Qing dynasty was deposed in 1911.  By outmaneuvering Sun Yat-Sen and (it is widely believed) assassinating Song Jiaoren,

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May 3, 2019 No Comments

Fun with Ontario Application Data

Every year or two, it’s fun to play with Ontario applications data (it would be fun to play with applications data from the rest of the country, too, but Ontario is the only place that actually aggregates it, so hold your hot-takes on upper-Canada-centricness).  And, it turns out, there are a lot of quite interesting stories. Let’s start with the programs of study.  The Ontario University Applications Centre modified its program categories a couple of years ago, so to look

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April 17, 2019 6 Comments

If Canada Were Serious About Higher Education (Part 3)

Yesterday, we considered how provincial governments could get serious about higher education.  Today, I want to start talking about institutions can get serious about their most important function: teaching. When it comes to provincial goal setting and making institutions accountable, measurement is the key to improvement.  I am not convinced this is entirely the case with teaching, because frankly no one knows how to measure it holistically.  There are things that can be learned by having students write tests like

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April 10, 2019 No Comments

That Weird Budget Commitment on Student Mobility

If you recall, way back in the middle of March, there was a federal budget (see our analysis here).  And as increasingly seems to be the case with Liberal budgets these days, there were a lot of unknowns.  Stuff that hadn’t been thought through.  Announcements on vague generalities with no actual policies behind them. (At the beginning of the Trudeau era, someone said “these people from Queen’s Park are used to running a government with six people; you can run

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April 5, 2019 No Comments

The Four Logics of International Student Mobility

One of the significant challenges in analyzing policies around international student mobility is that there are multiple competing logics at work within the field.  However, the tensions between these competing logics are often not acknowledged, which makes it difficult to understand how to make choices between them. Today, we will look at four logics concerning in-bound student mobility, in order to disentangle them and promote sensible policy analysis. The first logic of internationalization is what I call the pilgrimage logic:

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February 11, 2019 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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