Looking at the traffic on my web site last week suggests many of you have already headed off for the holidays to a probably well-deserved break. However, the end of the year kind of snuck up on me – is 2019 almost over already? As Queen once sang, another one bites the dust. Better make a list of Christmas presents. More...
In the most recent national survey of Canadian post-secondary institutions (Johnson, 2019), institutions were asked the location of their online students (in-province, out-of-province, international). The results, for me, were very surprising:
The report concluded that ‘ultimately, the majority of online students are from the same province in which the institution is located.’ This is despite the fact that over 85% of institutions reported that online education is strategically important for attracting students from outside their traditional service area. More...
Two housekeeping notes. First, blog service will resume bright and early on January 6th. Second, this will be my last-ever Friday blog. Many of you have over the years asked how I manage to put out this blog every day. The answer is that it is getting difficult for me to balance this with the growth of our business (it has been quite a good year at HESA Towers), so I’ve made a decision to pull back slightly and bring the blog down to a 4-times-per-week affair. More...
At the start of a new decade, it is fashionable to look ahead at what will happen in one’s sector. Personally, I think that life is going to change in ways we can’t imagine over the next ten years, so getting too specific is a fool’s errand. What I would like to do instead is talk about what the big challenges are going to be. More...
I know this seems a bit late because the election was almost three months ago, but unlike 2015, the victorious Liberals took their sweet time forming a government and it was not until mid-December, after this blog closed for the break, that it issued mandate letters to all its new Minsters. More...
As I noted back on Monday, one of the basic dynamics we see in Canadian public finance is the long-term deterioration of provincial finances and the long-term improvement of federal ones, mainly due to changing demographics and the cost of heath care. Take a look at the projections from the Parliamentary Budget Office from their 2018 Fiscal Sustainability Report, which shows this trend rather clearly: long-term provincial government debt numbers are off the charts, while the feds are on a continuous path to zero net debt. More...
Morning. Just after the blog closed for the holidays, Statistics Canada did its annual release of data from the FINCOL survey (that’s the one that asks colleges about their income and expenditure, just like FIUC does for universities, only in a lot less detail). So, as usual, I thought I would give you a look into the data. More...
At 6:12 AM last Wednesday morning at Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport, Ukrainian International Airways Flight 752 (PS752) trundled down the runway for take-off on its scheduled flight to Kyiv. The flight, with 176 souls aboard, carried roughly 60 Canadian citizens (source counts vary), as well as another 82 Iranians and 24 others, including the plane’s crew who were all Ukrainian. At least 130 of the passengers were connecting in Kyiv to another flight destined for Toronto and from there many were travelling throughout Canada. More...
Before Christmas, I made a bit of a fuss about the six Ontario Colleges who had made deals with private career colleges in the GTA to teach international students. The previous provincial government had decided to shut these agreements down because they seemed to pose systemic reputation risks to Ontario colleges, but the new one decided not only to leave them alone but to allow those colleges to double down on them, ostensibly on the grounds that they all really, really needed the money. I decided to find out if that were true by looking at the colleges’ latest financial statements. More...
One of my favourite reports released last winter was a little gem, written by a team of Ontario researchers and published by the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO), entitled High School Success and Access to Postsecondary Education. It tells the very good news story that access to post-secondary education is rising quite rapidly in the city of Toronto across all income groups. More...
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