By . A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a little bit about Nordic countries and some of the trade-offs they consider in order to keep tuition fees at zero when public funding is under stress. I thought I would complement this with a piece that looked at the access side of the Nordic system, both in terms of student aid and in terms of the kinds of access challenges that exist even in a free-tuition system. More...
Competition, Markets and the Persistence of Hegemonic Institutions
By . Competition metaphors abound in higher education. We talk about competition for students, competition for academics. Since the introduction of rankings – particularly the global ones about fifteen years ago – we talk about “moving up the tables”, in a squash-ladder kind of way. More...
Ontario Doubles Down on Dodgy Colleges
By . Remember about a month ago when I noted how several Ontario colleges now had international student numbers above 50% of total enrolment? And about how in some cases this was being done by small town colleges establishing “partnerships” with private vocational colleges in the Greater Toronto Area. More...
Monitoring Trends in Academic Programming
Standardization vs. Differentiation
By . One of the most annoying things about Canadian governments’ relationship with universities is the fact that almost none of them have a consistent theory of universities. In other words, few governments—provincial, federal, or territorial—have actual understanding of what it is they are funding and why they are funding it. More...
The Canadian Intangibles Agenda
By . For various reasons, I never quite got round to reviewing it at the time, but it’s worth examining because once we get over superclusters (please, let’s all get over superclusters), the country is going to be looking for some new organizing framework for innovation and growth policy. I suspect that this “intangibles” lens might be it. More...
Perpetual Growth
By . Just a quick one today, as the combination of a laptop failure and a MLS final in Seattle made the blog I had wanted to write impossible to finish. More...
Light Weekend Reading
By . I’ve been trying to read more about the history of Canadian institutions. One very short pamphlet-like read is called Hatching the Cowbird’s Egg by David R. Murray, about the origin of the University of Guelph (the title vaguely make sense if you read the whole book; in context it’s a reference to the fact that Guelph is a weirdly bolted-together set of institutions). More...
Intriguing New Data on PSE Access
By . For reasons that continue to baffle me, the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario keeps putting out quite fascinating research papers with almost no fanfare. Seriously, reading their publications page is the literary equivalent of the sound of a tree falling in an empty forest. Fabulous, fabulous stuff that somehow appears in conditions of near-absolute secrecy. More...
Big News on Free Speech
By . Cast your mind back oh, about fifteen months, to the Dawn of a New Era on Ontario campuses. One in which Speech Would Be Free. The Ford Government was new and fresh and so was the ink on a proclamation requiring all Ontario institutions to adopt a policy on free speech, consistent with the University of Chicago Statement of Principles on Free Expression, by January 1, 2019. More...