By . When writing last week about superclusters, I neglected to go through the actual “economic impact statements” that were being touted by the clusters themselves. It seems that the Industry Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED), has to some degree accepted the statements. More...
By . University leaders have to put up with a lot of crap from politicians and business people. There’s a lot of genuflecting to whatever the fads and feelings of the day are, just so they can appear “relevant” and “in tune”. More...
By . Canada usually alternates between good news and bad news when it comes to higher education data. Good news: we’re getting marginally better data on profs, for only $1 million per year. Bad news: we have literally no data on students beyond registration data anymore (social/economic background, anyone?), and no one seems to care. More...
By . Over the last few years I have noted a significant trend in provincial government spending across Canada, one which we termed “feed the student, starve the schools”. Basically, governments are a lot happier giving money to the children of middle-class voters students than they are to universities and colleges because there are more votes there. More...
By . A couple of months ago, I read a rather interesting book called National Innovation Systems and the Academic Enterprise, which is a collection of essays edited by David Dill and Frans van Vught. It’s a collection of essays about national – and in the case of the US, subnational – innovation policies, and while the quality of the national essays is a bit uneven (the Canadian one was marked mainly by overuse of the word “neoliberalism” and excessive off-point moaning about how SSHRC is hard done by compared to the other granting councils) it did make me really think about one significant concept which I hadn’t really thought about before: namely, science federalism. More...
By . To Paris, where a couple of big changes in education policy have led to student demonstrations. Not particularly large or effective demonstrations (not yet, anyway), but significant nonetheless. More...
By . Everyone, it sometimes seems, wants more international students. But is it possible to have too many international students? And if so, when? These days, it’s a delicate question: but where public dollars are at stake, it’s a question worth asking. More...
By . In all the excitement over Christmas I forgot to write about a policy initiative which may or may not find its way into the coming budget. It’s something called the “Canada Lifelong Learning Fund” (CLLF), and it is among the weakest ideas to float around Ottawa since the Liberals came to power. More...
By . I’ve written a few times over the years about the spread of Targeted Free Tuition (TFT) programs. Starting in Chile and Ontario in 2016 (after a false start in the UK in the late 1990s), they have started to spread around the world. There are three new spots where the program is either now in place or under consideration, so I thought I would keep you all up to date on its spread. More...
By . Recently, a colleague asked me how big I thought the gap in funding was between polytechnics and universities. My hunch was that universities were certainly better funded if you include all sources of income, but that if you just looked at core provincial government funding, the gap might not be so large. So, for giggles, I decided to try to compare the two. More...
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