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Tag: Ontario

Marketing “Free Tuition”

With a major student aid reform almost certain to be announced in the federal budget today, it’s worth pondering how the Ontario Liberals have managed to get themselves into a bit of a mess with how they’ve marketed their own changes to student aid. The Ontario reform, as you will recall, was a shuffling of money rather than an infusion of one (note: some of the shuffling was federal shuffling, not provincial shuffling – that is, the provincial changes are

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March 22, 2016 No Comments

The Coming Cost Debate in Ontario

Today I want to think about how the new Ontario system of student assistance is going to play out.  I think there is the potential here for quite an interesting and useful debate; but the timetable is somewhat tricky. As you will recall, the Government of Ontario is rolling out a plan to provide enough grants to fully offset tuition in most university and college programs for students from families with incomes of less than $50,000.  That’s going to happen

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March 8, 2016 1 Comment

A Great Day for Student Assistance

I was going to stay off the blog this whole week (I need a reading week, too!), but there was a budget in Ontario yesterday.  A weird and wonderful (if somewhat under-documented) budget, which is going to change the way we think about student aid, tuition, and affordability in Canada for decades to come. Here are the basics: all of Ontario’s different grants and loan remission programs are being merged together into one big up-front grant program (all the provincial

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February 26, 2016 7 Comments

The Dilemma of Western Education in Saudi Arabia

I see that Ontario premier Kathleen Wynne recently took offense to the fact that Algonquin College is operating a male-only vocational college in Jazan, Saudi Arabia, calling the arrangement “unacceptable”. What should we make of this? First of all, let’s be clear about women and higher education in Saudi Arabia.  There are a lot of them; in fact, far more women attend post-secondary education than men in the country.  They just don’t – for the most part – attend the

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February 5, 2016 2 Comments

Innovation Buzzword Bingo

Morning all.  Regular service will pushed back one week to January 10th, but I couldn’t let the Globe op-ed “Southern Ontario Should be an Innovation Cluster, Not a Farm Team” by three Ontario university presidents (McMaster’s Patrick Deane, Toronto’s Meric Gertler, and Waterloo’s Feridun Hamdullahpur) go without comment. The article reads like someone set out to fill a buzzword bingo card.  Words like “supercluster”, “resilient”, “enhancing interaction”, “external connectivity”, “cluster-building infrastructure”, and “entrepreneurship ecosystem” all duly make an appearance; hell, there’s even a

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January 4, 2016 6 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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