By Alex Usher. There has been much wailing these last couple of weeks about a “sensational” revelation made by Global News (and then again a couple of days later by CBC, as if Global didn’t exist, because that’s how media works) that the University of Waterloo admissions department has a special, secret list of high schools, indicating which ones seem to grade easier than others and also how to adjust grades from these schools so that they can judge applicants on a more or less common scale (the Ottawa Citizen published the actual list, here). More...

By Alex Usher. Last week, freshman Ontario Finance Minister Vic Fedeli appeared before the Economic Club in Toronto and, reading from the best-selling book “Oh My God Who Knew the Previous Government Left the Finances in Such Terrible Shape: A Guide to Your First Provincial Budget”, announced that the actual, real, pinkie swear, true budget deficit for this year was $15 billion rather than $6 billion and that to help close the gap, Ontario colleges and universities would be asked to increase their intake of international students by 25,000 or so. More...

By Alex Usher. Once upon a time, back when Frank McKenna’s was premier, New Brunswick was seen as something of a leader in Canadian public policy.  Balancing budgets, championing official languages, investing in telecommunications and the internet, creating jobs (even if a lot of them were in call centres) – New Brunswick was seen as having understood the nature of the Maritimes’ long-term challenges and moved decisively to address them. More...

By Alex Usher. Most university rankings (U-Multirank is the big exception) take a league table format originally used by esteemed psychologist, eugenicist and baseball enthusiast James McKeen Cattell in his early rankings early 20^th century (for more on Cattell see back here).  One effects of borrowing league tables as a metaphor is that there is an implicit assumption that the inhabitants of that table are able to move up and down the league table as baseball or football teams do. More...

By Alex Usher. Good morning, all. Today, HESA is publishing (jointly, with the Higher Education Policy Institute in London, England) a paper entitled, Targeted Free Tuition: A Global Analysis. This paper is the product of months of surveying an emerging trend in government-financed student aid and what is arguably the most important new idea in higher education financing currently floating around the world. More...

By Alex Usher. Yesterday, I took a quick trip back to the early part of the decade for a reminder of how bad the “skills shortage” debate of 5-6 years ago was.  Today, I want to talk a little bit about how we may be heading into something like an actual skills shortage right now, and what the parameters of that shortage look like. More...

By Alex Usher. Cast your mind back to 2012 or so.  The Conservative Party was in its sixth year of office, but just getting into the swing of a real majority.  The craziest thing we had to worry about in American politics was a 6-day outbreak of Santorum-mania.  Gagnam was in style.   And the one phrase on everyone’s lips was “skills shortage”. More...

By Alex Usher. If one takes a historical approach, then there are, broadly speaking, three types of colleges in Canada.  There are Quebec’s CEGEPs, which are sui generis both in Canada and internationally.  Technically creatures of the 1960s, their roots go back over a century to the French Catholic tradition of colleges classiques, which were a major form of both secondary and post-secondary education (they straddled the two) from the early nineteenth century onwards. Following the Parent Report, these colleges had a secondary vocational mission tacked on to them in the re-organization of the Quebec education system after the Parent Report. More...

By Alex Usher. While I was putting together The State of Post-Secondary Education, 2018 I did a simple comparison looking at provincial government funding for universities and colleges, using data from FIUC and FINCOL (the Statscan surveys of the finances of universities and colleges, respectively). More...

By Alex Usher. You may have seen that late last week, the Business Higher Education Roundtable (BHER) rounded up a number of big names from colleges, universities and businesses to sign a letter to Finance Bill Morneau calling for the development of a National Work-Integrated Learning (WIL) Strategy as part of the 2019 Budget.  What should we make of this. More...