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Tag: Reports

The Heinous Difficulty in Understanding What Works

The empirical consensus on the question of barriers to access in Canadian education is pretty clear: and among those few secondary school graduates who don’t go on to post-secondary education, affordability is very much a secondary issue (not non-existent, but secondary). The primary issue is that most of these young people don’t feel very motivated by the idea of spending more years in a classroom. It’s a vicious circle: these students don’t identify with education, so they don’t work at

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February 29, 2012 2 Comments

The Drummond Report

If you’re from Ontario, you’ll have had yesterday penciled into your calendars, like a trip to the dentist, for weeks. If you’re from outside Ontario, you’re likely at least dimly aware that Premier McGuinty punted the matter of long-term fiscal stabilization to Don Drummond, an ex-Ottawa mandarin, so that his ministers could take to the hustings last fall saying everything was under control when in fact this place is broke, broke, broke. Anyway, Drummond released his report yesterday and it’s

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February 16, 2012 1 Comment

Faculty Productivity

It’s easy to get distracted by arguments about whether faculty are paid too much or too little. The better question is: why does everyone get paid on more or less the same scale when the massive differences in productivity between staff are so obvious? Some interesting evidence about this came recently from Texas. Last year, Governor Rick Perry (yes, him… the one who makes Herman Cain look Presidential) asked the state’s public universities to make data available on each professor

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December 7, 2011 5 Comments

The Robin des Bois of Canadian Higher Education

In its budget this past spring, Jean Charest’s government announced its plans to increase tuition in Quebec by $325 per year for five years, beginning next fall. By 2016-17, the basic undergraduate tuition in Quebec will reach $3,792 for a typical, 30-credit year. While the tuition increase will keep Quebec students’ fees well below the average elsewhere in Canada, the increases still clock in at 75% over five years. Clearly there is potential for a significant impact on enrolment. So it

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November 3, 2011 3 Comments

Well, That Was Interesting

The Report of the Expert Panel on R&D, that is. It’s an intriguing and well-written piece of work (kudos to Peter Nicholson), at least as much for what it doesn’t say as what it does. There are three things this report does extremely well: i) it explains the mind-boggling number of tiny programs the federal government supports, ii) it graphically shows how the Scientific Research and Experimental Development program massively overshadows all other panels combined and iiI), it amusingly tells

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October 18, 2011 No 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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