By Alex Usher. Some might think of debt-free PSE as being similar to tuition-free PSE, but in fact they are quite different in practice for two reasons.  The first difference is that under debt-free PSE, the level of tuition can be anything you please: the only thing that is constant is that all aid is provided in the form of a grant rather than a loan. More...

By Alex Usher. Earlier this week the Manitoba Government released a report that I and my colleague Yves Pelletier worked on for most of last year, the Manitoba College Review (you can read the report here). It was a challenging assignment, but I am very grateful to the many people to everyone who spent time with us and contributed to the report, and to all the alumni who answered our survey. More...

By Alex Usher. So, on Monday, I showed how Ontario universities are changing their enrolment patterns in response to changing demand and what we saw was that over the period 2009-2016, enrolments in Arts stayed flat while enrolments in STEM rose by nearly 40%. More...

By Alex Usher. Just as I finish writing about the huge boom in STEM enrolments, along comes the Financial Post’s Diane Francis with a dumb-as-a-bag-of-hammers op-ed effectively arguing that international students are stealing all the spots in Science and Engineering. More...

By Alex Usher. Last week I did a blog about changes in applications to Ontario universities by field of study which included this graph, which seems to have freaked a lot of people out. More...

By Alex Usher. A couple of months ago I reviewed Christopher Newfield’s The Great Mistake and said it was a great book that was very much worth reading, despite the fact that I disagreed with its central premise.  Well, I have another one of those, and it’s Peter MacKinnon’s new book: University Commons Divided: Exploring Debate and Dissent on Campus. More...

By Alex Usher. Here’s a story you might have heard about access policy in Scotland: the (right-wing, neoliberal) Labour government of the late 1990s imposed tuition fees on Scottish students and students were very hard done by. About a decade later, the (lefty, progressive) Scottish Nationalist Party government abolished tuition fees and everything was suddenly a student paradise. More...

By Alex Usher. It’s always good, once in awhile, to check up on application statistics, just to check up on demand for education.  Ontario, thank God, has a system that allows you to look at applications system-wide.  A few years ago, everyone was panicking about falling application numbers because of a five percent fall in 2013-2015, mostly caused by a significant fall in the number of 18 year-olds. More...

By Alex Usher. Remember about twenty months ago when everyone was gaga over the idea that the feds were going to pay for an expanded version of the faculty survey? And there would be data on part-timers!  And on equity criteria!   And maybe community colleges too. More...

By Alex Usher. About a month ago, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives put out a report on precarious employment in Ontario universities and colleges.
One good thing about this document at the outset: it has an imaginative research design.  There is so much we do not know, and in the absence of any detailed reporting by institutions themselves cannot know about employment in post-secondary institutions. More...