By Alex Usher. The paper compares the fortunes of two groups of Canadians: those who were 25-34 at the time of the 1991 census and those who were the same age at the time of the 2001 census.  It then follows each of them using tax data for the next 15 years (ie. until the ’91 cohort was 40-49 in 2006 and until the ’01 cohort was the same age in 2016). More...

By Alex Usher. If you spend any time looking at student aid research, you’ll be struck by how much empirical evidence there is on the effectiveness of grants (or, more broadly, “changes in net tuition”), and how little there is in terms of the effectiveness of loans. More...

By Alex Usher. There is a small sub-genre of higher education books that I call “University Procedurals.” The are microscopically detailed accounts detailing how institution X accomplished Y in mind-numbing committee-meeting-by-committee-meeting detail. More...

By Alex Usher. Every once in awhile, universities in Ontario all decide to get on a bandwagon and do the same thing at the same time.  This winter, the bandwagon seems to be economic impact statements. More...

By Alex Usher. Yesterday I talked about how disappointing/not fit for purpose university and college economic impact statements tend to be.  Today I want to talk about how to make them better. More...

By Alex Usher. I’ve been reading David Edgerton’s new book The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, which presents a bracingly contrarian view of Britain’s 20^th Century.  It is, I think, particularly intriguing concerning whether the British left actually more nationalist than socialist (a question which I think might also be usefully asked of Canada’s own left). More...

By Alex Usher. At most Canadian universities, student election season is about to start.  So, today, a quick note for anyone out there thinking about joining the ranks of student representatives. More...

By Alex Usher. The big longread event in this weekend’s papers was, without question, Shannon Gormley’s piece in Macleans on the Thai Cave Rescue (if you haven’t read it yet, stop everything and do so.  I’ll be here when you get back.  Amazing, right?  OK, let’s move on.) More...