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Category: Students

The Neo-Soviet View of Education and the Labour Market

Recently, I had a conversation with someone in the trucking industry who argued that the phenomenon of Arts grads working minimum wage jobs while trucking companies were having problems hiring people at $30/hour was prima facie evidence for a “skills mismatch” for which the education system was responsible.  Seriously.  Turns out that a lot of people – including a hell of a lot of people in government from all political stripes – seem to think that a “skills mismatch” is

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August 12, 2013 1 Comment

Today’s Statscan Youth Jobs Report

Hi there.  Just a slight deviation from the summer publication schedule to bring you some perspective on the youth employment numbers coming out of StatsCan today. Unless something has gone seriously gaga in the youth labour market in the past few weeks, today’s Labour Force Survey release will say that slightly over 70% of students aged 20-24 are employed and that unemployment among these students is in the 7-9% range. That sounds pretty good; the problem is that StatsCan’s definition

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July 5, 2013 No Comments

The Latest Bandwagon – American Students

Over the past couple of weeks, there has been a lot of talk about US students coming to Canada.  NBC ran a segment on Americans at McGill, and the Globe and Mail ran a piece on the same.  This seems to have led many institutions to start thinking “hot damn, another market! How can we grab us some of these Americans?”   But for most institutions, this would be the wrong reaction.  Before venturing into a market, every school needs to

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June 10, 2013 2 Comments

The Limits to Internationalization

There’s a very important question that institutions across the land will soon need to confront, namely: how many international students can a public institution accept before taxpayers and governments say “no more”? It’s not an idle question.  In Switzerland, serious concerns are being raised about foreign student numbers that are getting close to the 40% mark.  In the US, where big flagship public universities have been adding international students in droves over the past few years, most feel reluctant to

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May 2, 2013 No Comments

A Two-Tier Tuition Regime in Quebec?

Things are getting interesting in Quebec.  First Laval and now l’Université de Montreal are publicly threatening to leave the Conseil des Receteurs et Principaux des Universites du Quebec (CREPUQ).  In the discreet and diplomatic world of Canadian University politics, this is like blowing a vuvuzela during a piano recital. At one level, this is a delayed reaction to CREPUQ’s limp performance during last year’s tuition fee debate.  At the outset, all institutions agreed to take a common position and speak through CREPUQ,

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April 19, 2013 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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