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Category: Tuition

The End of Participation Growth

One of the things that I find extremely worrying about higher education policy these days is that we’ve simply stopped talking about increasing access to the system. Oh, sure, you will hear lots of talk about affordability, that is, making the system cheaper—and hence arguments about the correct level of tuition fees—but that’s not the same. Even to the extent that these things did meaningfully affect accessibility (and it’s not at all clear that they do), no one phrases their

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May 13, 2025 3 Comments

Getting Serious about Apprenticeships

As I noted back on Monday, for a variety of deeply atavistic reasons, Canadian political parties have decided that the knowledge economy is out and some kind of 1960s economy based, improbably, on the construction industry, is in. And so, similarly, postsecondary students are out along with colleges and universities, while apprentices and skilled trades are in. Which, you know, whatever. Fine. But if we are going to do this, parties need to start developing policies which will improve our

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April 30, 2025 2 Comments

How Program Closure Decisions Get Made

A lot of institutions, in reaction to recent changes are going through program closure (or in politer terms “program suspensions” which in theory means they might get resurrected at some point be revived or saved, but don’t bet the house on it). So, it’s worth going through how these decisions tend to get made. Contrary to what you might hear, “low enrollment” technically is not the reason anyone closes a program: it’s a bit more complicated than that. The real

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March 3, 2025 3 Comments

The Eighth Wonder of the World: Ontario College Finances to 2023-24

Over the summer some of the HESA team went through the financial statements of the 24 Ontario Community Colleges for both 2022-2023 and 2023-24 statements. It’s…well, pretty wild. Ontario colleges were going after international students pretty heavily before COVID. But in the two years since the pandemic mostly subsided, the numbers are crazy. We don’t know exactly how crazy because the Government of Ontario, in an amazing show of either incompetence or gutlessness, is now five months late in releasing

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September 18, 2024 6 Comments

A Sub-par Study on Returns to Education

Last Week, Royal Bank produced a study with the brash headline “Financial Returns After a Post-Secondary Education Have Diminished.” Within the limited terms of the limited methodology of the first half of the mini-paper, the headline is not entirely incorrect. But man, this is a disappointing piece of analysis from an organization with pretensions to thought leadership. So, what does this paper say? Basically, part 1 of the paper takes four data points for university (NOT all of post-secondary—strike one

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September 17, 2024 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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