By . Recently, someone asked me what I thought Canada’s most iconic university building was. That is, which building is a) instantly recognizable and b) utterly representative of the campus on which it sits? I put the question out on twitter and got some interesting answers from my excellent and disputatious followers. More...
By . The government of Canada has essentially four mechanisms for transferring money to post-secondary institutions. The first, as discussed yesterday, is the indirect means of transfers to provinces. The second is through the research granting councils: the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC); as of 2018, the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), which disburses money for scientific infrastructure, is now considered the fourth granting council. More...
By . Last week, I got an email from the Atlantic Association of Universities. “Great news!” it said. “Enrollment in Atlantic Canadian universities rose by 2.4% last year!” That’s pretty good, I thought to myself, given the demographic crunch and all. So, I clicked through on the document to get to where I can see the institution-by-institution data. More...
By . Transfers for PSE began in 1951 when the Government of Canada decided to devote 50 cents per capita to the task ($7.1 million in 1951 dollars, or about $65 million in today’s money). This was not a transfer to provinces because Quebec Premier Duplessis – quite rightly – told the feds that the idea of tied transfers was a constitutional non-starter. So to get around this problem, the National Conference of Canadian Universities (i.e Universities Canada, two name-changes ago) set up a shell organization called the Canadian Universities Fund, which took money from the feds and distributed it to universities directly, except in Quebec where Duplessis told institutions he’d cut their budgets dollar for dollar if they accepted the money. More...
By . Thanks for sticking with me through my highly unofficial and deeply idiosyncratic history of Canadian PSE. I suppose if it doesn’t meet standards of historical inquiry, at least you all now have a pretty good sense of my priorities when it comes to understanding developments in Canadian higher education.
Looking back at the full sweep of Canadian PSE’s history, it’s worth thinking about the paths we didn’t take. From the first, we didn’t take the English route of having just a few elite residential colleges and three year degrees. At Confederation, there were already more universities in Canada than in England and by and large they were on the Scottish model not the English one. More...
By . The current era of PSE in Canada essentially took shape at the end of the Chretien Era. There has been a little bit of evolution in institutional forms (this is the era in which “polytechnics” arrive and applied research becomes a thing at the college level, and several colleges were converted into universities) but really no change in system architecture. There are certainly budget changes – rapidly increasing in the period to about 2009, and then levelling off with international student fees replacing government grants thereafter – but they have been slow and incremental. More...
By . The Chretien era – roughly 1994 to 2003 – deserves to be remembered as a time of tremendous change in Canadian post-secondary education. Or, as an enormous, stomach-churning, roller-coaster. And though it is mighty odd that a federal politician defined an era in a field of what is essentially provincial, the record is clear. More...
By . The economic and fiscal history of Canada from the early 70s to the mid-90s is one long, bad disaster movie (the Cassandra Crossing, say). Unemployment went over 6% in 1974 and didn’t come back down to that level until 2008. For nearly all of the 1980s, it was over 8% and from 1982 to 1994 it was over 10% half the time. The Keynesian medicine that was supposed to get us out of such messes simply did not work because the problems were structural. More...
By . The period roughly from 1959 to the oil crisis of 1973-74 is rightly thought of as a Golden Age for higher education in Canada, much as it is in the United States. Universities ballooned in size and gradually became more research-intensive. A new class of institutions, community colleges, were added to the system. Provinces finally got around to thinking systemically about higher education, and electorates were broadly tolerant about spending any amount of money to expand and improve the system. More...
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