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Tag: Ontario

Projections From Queen’s Park

Professionally, I am a killjoy.  Most of my job involves explaining why education funding is not going to go back to the good times of the eighties any time soon.  How bad things are going to get differs from place to place, and today I want to show you why I think there’s big trouble still ahead in Ontario. Let’s start with the fact that government expenditures have risen sharply in recent years, as shown in figure 1.  The Liberals

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June 12, 2013 No Comments

That teacher training announcement

Last week, the province of Ontario made an interesting decision regarding teacher education programs in the province. As of next year, programs will double in length (2 years instead of 1) and the intake will be halved.  The government says the extra year will mean higher quality graduates which – whether true or not – is an enormously amusing argument for the government to make so soon after former Minister Glen “3 years” Murray swore blind that degree length and

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June 11, 2013 3 Comments

Post-Graduation Employment

The meme on “underperforming universities” these days revolves around the idea that specific fields of study – usually Bachelor’s degrees in the humanities – do not lead to good jobs.  But this depends in no small measure on what one means by a “good job”, and over what time frame one chooses to measure success. The graph below shows data from Ontario, six months after graduation.  Between 2003-2007, the employment rate of graduates in the labour market (i.e. excluding those

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May 21, 2013 5 Comments

Discipline, Consistency, and Commitment

Although its release didn’t get much play last week, HEQCO’s report on the results of the Strategic Mandate Agreement process was noteworthy.  Read casually, it’s a formal and polite response to a government request for advice.  But it’s actually better understood as a primal scream – albeit one elegantly rendered in true Embrace-and-Contain style – demanding some grown-up policy-making for a change. The SMA process was initiated back when Glen Murray (remember him?) decided to negotiate Strategic Mandates with each of

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April 8, 2013 No Comments

A Persistent Problem with Truth

When it comes to the subjects of debt and tuition fees, the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) is the least trustworthy source on earth.  They lie.  Constantly. To see the latest collection, just look at this press release, which averages roughly one lie per paragraph.  For instance: “Since 2006, tuition fees have increased as much as 71 per cent in Ontario”.  The words “as much as” are doing a lot of work here.  For the vast majority of programs, the 5% annual increase

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April 1, 2013 8 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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