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Category: Students

The Brampton Charter

I sometimes get accused of being more pre-occupied with the faults in higher education than the successes.  And that’s natural, I suppose: while HESA (it’s not just me folks, there’s fifteen of us here) tends to position itself as a “critical friend” to higher education, writing a blog about the subject sometimes ends up looking like a journalistic approach to the subject, i.e. going from one disaster to another.  So instead, let me tell you about an interesting experiment happening

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February 22, 2023 No Comments

Data Priorities

You all know I complain a lot about data in Canada.  So today, I thought I’d assemble a wish list: a set of priorities for developing a better system of higher education data, along with some thoughts about how these measures could be implemented as part of a larger, overall accountability agenda Now, I am going to focus on the need for new data but there is a lot that could be done to make better use of existing data. 

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November 29, 2022 1 Comment

Student Well-Being

Note: this article contains references to sexual violence, harassment, and suicide/self-harm. For a couple of decades now, the American College Health Association (ACHA) has been administering a ridiculously long and detailed survey called the National College Health Assessment, which goes under the unwieldy title of ACHA-NCHA.  Since 2013, a number of Canadian institutions have taken part in this as well, which allows for some reasonably interesting comparisons over time. (N.b. since Fall 2019, a new iteration of the survey has

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November 28, 2022 No Comments

The Affordability of Canadian Universities, Part 4

The final objection to the idea I’ve been pushing for the last couple of weeks – namely, that higher education might be getting more affordable (which it is, to some extent, by most tuition-related measures of affordability) – is that tuition-related measures of affordability are in adequate and don’t cover and so do not do justice to the current “the cost of living crisis”.  Broadly, this is true.  But, I suggest, it’s not actually true for everyone, and even for

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November 15, 2022 No Comments

The Affordability of Canadian Universities, 2020, Part 1

The affordability of higher education is vital for the accessibility of higher education.  Unfortunately, much of the debate around affordability is conducted in terms simply of prices, and usually inflation-unadjusted ones at that.  But while price is an input to affordability, it is not the whole story.  In fact, it is exactly half the story: the numerator, if you will.  The other half, the denominator, is capacity to pay.  And yet for some reason we almost never bring this into

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November 8, 2022 4 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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