Category: Students

Back to School, September 2023

Good morning, and welcome back for another year.  I’m pretty excited for the next few months.  Let me take you through how things are going to go, both in Canadian postsecondary education and here on the blog. In an ideal world, the next few months would lead to an all-out push on new investments in scientific research.  The buying power of national investments in research – which were still pretty good as recently as 15 years ago – are now

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Counting the Previously Uncounted

Morning all.  No podcast today: we had some scheduling difficulties that require us to switch up Monday’s blog to today, and the interview on Saudi Arabia with Annalisa Pavan to Monday.  Our apologies. Earlier this week, the good folks at Statscan released i) a pretty cool infographic about students in private post-secondary education in Canada and ii) a remarkably nerdy piece, technically a report on a “pilot project,” about how they came up with the numbers in the infographic.  Strangely, it didn’t publish

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The Bailiffs Are at the Door

Just a short one today, because I am spending my Sunday on a flight to Almaty and have less time than usual to blog. Last month, I wrote “The Bill is Coming Due”.  It largely revolved around the theme that Canadian PSE institutions were too dependent on international students and that relatively minor failures in recruitment were now causing institutions real harm.  Also last month, I wrote about Ontario colleges and how they were killing the Golden Goose of international

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Ontario Colleges. Again.

Hi all.  Just a short note before getting into this blog post that we at HESA Towers are trying something a bit new.  On Thursday, we are hosting an online meeting for everyone across the country who is interested in institutional policies on teaching and learning with respect to AI programs based on Large Language Models.  Want to know how many institutions are seeing the issue mainly as a plagiarism problem and how many are seeing it as an opportunity

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Two POVs on the Coming Student Grant Changes

The Canadian Alliance of Student Associations has started a new campaign, entitled #halfyourCSG.  It rails against the perceived risk of a 50% drop in the maximum value of the Canada Student Grant (CSG) come this fall.  This might be kind of a sleeper issue for PSE over the next few weeks, so it’s worth taking a look at what the issues are and how everything might play out. To recap the policy evolution here: in 2016 the Liberal government raised

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