Hi everyone, Hope you are all having a great summer. Just wanted to drop a line to let you know about a big new HESA initiative.   As you may know, over the past year, HESA has been maintaining an Observatory on AI Policies in Canadian Post-Secondary Education and hosting regular Roundtables on the same topic. Even if we’re skeptical that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is anywhere near the horizon (count me with Gary Marcus on this one), it’s quite clear that Generative AI is likely to have a very big impact on society and the world of work. And for that reason, we think ..read more

The history of the research university is a much-discussed thing. Fundamentally, these histories tend to focus on two countries: Germany, where it all began in 1810 thanks to the genius of Wilhelm von Humboldt, and the United States, which took fitful steps towards challenging Germany from the 1870s to the 1930s, at which point American universities, taking advantage of the exodus of scientific talent from Europe, moved decisively into a position of global intellectual leadership. And so things stayed for 70 years until a new challenger showed up: China. Building on a Confucian tradition of ..read more

Good morning, all. This is the final blog for the year apart from tomorrow’s podcast. I am probably going to do one or two blogs if and when big news comes up during the summer (and we at HESA will have some big event-related news fairly shortly, so stay tuned). As usual, all feedback and suggestions for the blog are welcome—just drop me a note at president at higher ed strategy dot com. Regular daily service will return on Tuesday September 3rd. But before I go, I wanted to finish up with one final thought about this year and what it means for higher education. It’s about Figure 1, which I di ..read more

Good morning, all. This is the last week of the blog before summer begins. As usual, you’ll get my mid-year sign-off on Wednesday and my set of book reviews tomorrow. But today, I have two quick items to get off my chest (originally I had four, but I guess the other two will have to wait until September). To wit: 1) Bad Policy Incoming As I noted back here, the Ministry of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, Canada (IRCC) has, though a decade of maximum irresponsibility on the part of the provinces, become the country’s de facto ministry of higher education despite section 93 of the Co ..read more

One of the most interesting stories in global higher education over the past couple of years has been the creeping government takeover of higher education in Hungary. The most famous example of this was the government expelling the George Soros-funded Central European University, which subsequently took up residence in Austria. Less well-known perhaps is the process of severing public universities from the state and creating Foundation universities. For the most part this meant giving institutions North American-style managerial and financial autonomy, but saddling them with a governance str ..read more

Just a note that I am at the CAUBO Conference in Montreal today…if you are attending, do drop by my session today after lunch and say “hi.” Yesterday I sketched out a possible research agenda for Canadian higher education. Today, I am going to sketch out how we can best achieve this. What needs to be done at the National level The most important thing we could do is replace the Youth In Transition Survey. This was a longitudinal survey which followed two cohorts of youth for 12 years from 2000 onwards. The younger of these two cohorts was also the first Canadian cohort to take the no ..read more

There is so much about Canadian higher education that we don’t know. Today, a list of the most important unknowns that I think are most important, organized by broad topic. Who Gets Into Post-Secondary Education: Also, Where and Why and For How Long? Our data on who gets into post-secondary education has got a little bit better in the last little while. For instance, check out this interesting piece by Tomasz Handler, Aneta Bonikowska and Marc Frenette which looks at Bachelor’s degree access and completion by ethnicity. But you know what we still have very little idea about? Access b ..read more

Spotlight Good afternoon all,  This coming week, HESA will be at the QS EduData Summit “AI and Digitally Empowered Education”, in Washington DC. If you are attending the event, come say hi! Next Roundtable Meeting Date: Thursday, June 20th, 2024 Time: 12h00-1h30PM ET Online Book Club: “Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI” by Ethan Mollick Although we officially completed our Winter 2024 series of AI Roundtables last week, we are coming back to you with a special summer event!  Inspired by the discussion at a recent AI Roundtable event, Higher Education Strategy Asso ..read more

I was just running the numbers on student debt in Ontario. They are interesting. Time used to be that the Provincial government published these numbers on its own. This Ontario open data set has data from 2003-04 to 2011-12. Since then, I have been filing FOI requests and the government have been providing identical basis. Figure 1 shows the results, according to the administrative data held by the Government of Ontario. Turns out that based on this data—which should be the most accurate available—student debt in 2020-21, far from “skyrocketing,” was actually right about where it was in 2003-0 ..read more

A bit of a change this week. Our scheduled episode with Dr. Andrea Peto and Dr. Jo-Anne Dillabough about illiberal universities has been moved to next week. This week, instead, we’re trying a little experiment: talking to my colleague, Dr. Gero Federkeil, who is head of international projects at the Centrum für Hochschulentwicklung, or Center for Higher Education, in Gütersloh, Germany, about two totally unrelated topics. The first has to do with the changing profile of university enrolments in Germany, a subject on which Gero has recently published an article in University World News. Part ..read more