HIGHER EDUCATION

Drawing blood from stones: The relentless tuition fee hike

| March 28, 2013

Ontario announced a new tuition fee framework today. It's the first time that the Liberal government has changed it in seven years.

In 2006, Dalton McGuinty punched students in the face with a five per cent, on average, fee increase. It was supposed to last four years, but was extended, painfully, until 2012.

During the 2011 Ontario election, the Liberals introduced a grant to help offset the burden of these fees for some students. To those of us who spent days analyzing the Liberal proposal and strategy, it was clear that they had hoped to divert some of the negative attention on their tuition policy by offering a confusing, runner-up prize.

11 clues that the PCs' 11 Paths to Prosperity is a joke

Nora Loreto

| February 14, 2013

While I’m not sure others did, I totally got the joke.

I saw people responding to the Progressive Conservatives’ White Paper on higher education and thought, “Boy, they’re going to be embarrassed when they realize that this is a joke.”

As the party panders to elitists, there are many clues dropped into the paper that can be hard to spot for your average Joe Blow journalist. Most Ontarians may think that Hudak’s proposal should be taken seriously.

The neoliberal attacks on Québec higher education

Nora Loreto

| February 4, 2013

Change the conversation, support rabble.ca today.

For a post-secondary education junkie like me, my move to Québec couldn’t have been better timed.

Energy dominates Council of the Federation meetings

Christopher Majka

| November 26, 2012

One might imagine that Alberta premier Alison Redford and Quebec premier Pauline Marois stole the show at the Council of the Federation meetings in Halifax, NS with their announcement -- even before the meetings had officially commenced -- that they had agreed to put together a working group of officials to examine the possibilities of moving oil from Alberta to eastern and Atlantic Canada. In fact, the announcement underscored what was the dominant theme of this gathering of provincial and territorial leaders: energy.

What quality assurance practices mean for Ontario's universities

Nora Loreto

| November 16, 2012

The traditional model of quality assurance, where professors and institutional bodies evaluate, approve and improve programs, has always existed in Ontario. However, the centralization and standardization of quality assurance has been accelerated by university and college administrators and encouraged by Ministry staff. External pressures for standardization from the OECD and processes emerging in Europe through the Bologna process have driven these changes.

British Universities Funding Cuts 2

Continued from here.

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The Crisis in Higher Education

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Weekly Audit: Wolf in sheep's clothing -- the myth of fiscal conservatism

Lindsay Beyerstein

| March 29, 2011

Fashionable pundits like to say that the Republican Party has shifted its focus from "social conservatism" (e.g., banning abortion, shoving gays back in the closet, teaching school children that humans and dinosaurs once walked the earth hand-in-claw) to fiscal conservatism (e.g., tax cuts for the rich, slashing social programs). But is that really true? Tim Murphy of Mother Jones argues that the old culture war issues never really went away. Rather, the Republicans have simply rephrased their social agenda in fiscal terms.

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