Tag: HESA

  • Focus Friday: October 24 | HESA

    Focus Friday: October 24 | HESA

    Hi everyone,

    Tiffany here.

    A quick reminder that there is a Focus Friday session today (October 24) from 12:30-1:30pm Eastern on International Student Enrolment.

    I’ll be joined by Victor Tomiczek (Director of International Recruitment and Global Partnerships at Cape Breton University) and Eric Simard (Director of Fanshawe International and former Director of International Recruitment and Market Development at Fanshawe College). We’ll be discussing past, current, and expected future trends in international student recruitment, enrolment, and engagement.

    If you haven’t registered yet, it’s not too late. Register here.

    Looking Back

    Two weeks ago, we gathered for a conversation that hit close to home: What does the student experience look and feel like today?

    I was joined by three people who live and breathe these questions every day: Wasiimah Joomun (Canadian Alliance of Student Associations, a federal student advocacy organization for college, university and polytechnic students), Brendan Roberts (Students Nova Scotia), a provincial level student advocacy organization for university and college students), and Olamipo Ogunnote (Ontario Student Voices, a provincial advocacy organization for college students). Together, they painted a vivid picture of how students are navigating post-secondary life in 2025. What we heard was both sobering and hopeful.

    Wasiimah reminded us that the purpose of post-secondary has shifted. Students aren’t coming to explore anymore; they’re coming to survive. “We’ve turned education from a space of discovery into a checklist for employability,” she said. Costs are rising, pressures are mounting, and the system is asking students to thrive in conditions it wasn’t built to support. “Students are no longer exploring their interests; they’re trying to match what the labour market needs” she said.

    Brendan spoke about the ripple effects of affordability on mental health and belonging. From housing, food, transportation, all of it weighs heavily. “You can’t build a community for someone,” he said, “but you can give them the tools to foster it themselves.” Students need the chance, and support, to create their own networks, not just attend the ones we design for them.

    Olami brought the conversation to Ontario’s college sector, where students are juggling work, caregiving, and coursework, often all in the same day. He shared the story of one student finishing an eight-hour shift, racing home to her kids, and starting her assignment at midnight. “Resilience,” Olami said, “shouldn’t be about surviving hardship. It should be about thriving with opportunity.” Olami added to the piece on community with a great comment that has stuck with me since our conversation, “real community doesn’t come from infographics, it comes from matching the reality of students’ lives.”

    Across all three perspectives, the thread was clear: affordability touches everything. Forty percent of students skip meals. One in four struggle to pay rent. One in five use food banks. Four percent have experienced homelessness. Students are still choosing education, but they’re not sure if their institutions and their governments through investment are choosing them back.

    And yet, there’s optimism. Students still believe in the value of learning. They want to help shape institutions that see them not only as learners, but as people with families, jobs, and ambitions that stretch far beyond the classroom.

    You can catch the full conversation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywcHrBEwA-M.

    Looking Ahead

    On the next Focus Friday, we will be covering the hottest topic of that week: the Federal Budget. What happens, what it means, and what the early reactions to it are. That conversation happens on November 7th, and registration is already open (see below, in a big green box).

    In the meantime, keep sharing your ideas in the registration form or reach out anytime at [email protected].

    I’m looking forward to seeing many of you this afternoon, and again in two weeks.

    Cheers,

    Tiff

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  • Focus Friday: October 10 | HESA

    Focus Friday: October 10 | HESA

    Hi everyone,

    Tiffany here.

    A quick reminder that there is a Focus Friday session today (October 10) from 12:30–1:30pm Eastern on the Student Experience.

    I’ll be joined by Wasiimah Joomun (Executive Director, Canadian Alliance of Student Associations), Brendan Roberts (Executive Director, Students Nova Scotia), and Olamipo Ogunnote (Director of Advocacy and Strategic Partnerships, Ontario Student Voices) for a conversation on student experience—from campus culture and communication to what feels most different about being a student today.

    If you haven’t registered yet, it’s not too late. Register here.

    The format is simple: we’ll start with a few questions to our invited guests, then open the floor for a coffee-chat style discussion. Bring your ideas, hang out, and learn something new.

    Looking Back

    Two weeks ago, we launched our first Focus Friday with a big question: What will Canada’s post-secondary system need to look like to thrive by 2035?

    I was joined by Jackie Pichette from RBC Thought Leadership and Sunny Chan from the Business + Higher Education Roundtable (BHER), two people who’ve spent the past few months travelling the country with us, listening to hundreds of ideas about the future of higher ed. Together, we tried to pull those threads into a single conversation about where we go next.

    A few themes stood out:

    Both Jackie and Sunny agreed that Canada’s post-secondary system has to get much more comfortable with change. As Sunny put it, we’re still “a little scared of big changes.” From funding models to internal governance, we need more room, and more courage, to experiment. Jackie imagined a future where the morning news is full of stories about new programs and partnerships instead of program cuts. “I hope ten years from now I hear stories about innovation, not layoffs,” she said.

    That optimism came with some realism, too. Jackie talked about how Canada’s national priorities such as defence, AI, and energy, depend on colleges and universities producing the talent to match. Right now, she said, the gap between what’s needed and what’s being trained is wider than it should be.

    Sunny offered the employer perspective. Work-integrated learning has gone from a nice-to-have to an expectation, but the challenge now is building lasting partnerships instead of one-off placements. “The most successful collaborations,” she said, “aren’t projects with an end date—they’re embedded relationships.”

    Another topic that kept coming up was AI. Jackie argued that AI literacy should be treated like critical thinking—something every student gains, regardless of discipline. Some institutions, like Ohio State University, have already made AI fluency mandatory for all students. Canadian institutions can’t afford to wait too long to follow suit.

    Of course, none of this happens without money and trust. Jackie pointed out that institutions need both more flexible funding and stronger financial aid if they’re going to modernize responsibly. And both speakers reflected on the erosion of public confidence in higher education. Sunny framed it simply: “If institutions can better tell their impact stories, it makes it easier for employers to champion them.”

    Looking ahead to 2035, both ended on a hopeful note. Jackie hopes that by then, lifelong learning will finally be the default where people can stack, pivot, and return to education without starting from scratch. Sunny envisions institutions that serve whole communities, not just students aged 18 to 22, acting as anchors of both economic and civic life.

    Want to listen or watch this discussion? You can find it on YouTube.

    Looking Ahead

    We’ll be turning next to enrolment. How it’s changing, what’s staying the same, and what institutions are learning along the way. That conversation happens on October 24, and registration is already open (see below, in a big green box).

    In the meantime, keep sharing your ideas in the registration form or reach out anytime at [email protected].

    I’m looking forward to seeing many of you this afternoon, and again in two weeks.

    Cheers,

    Tiff

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  • Three Notable StatsCan Papers | HESA

    Three Notable StatsCan Papers | HESA

    Over the summer, Statistics Canda put out a few papers on higher education and immigration which got zero press but nevertheless are interesting enough that I thought you might all want to hear about them. Below are my précis: 

    The first paper, Recent trends in immigration from Canada to the United States by Feng Hou, Milly Yang and Yao Lu, is a very general look at outbound migration to the United States, looking  specifically at the characteristics of Canadian citizens who applying for labour certification in the United States in 2015 and in 2024. I found the three top-line results all somewhat surprising.

    • The number of US certification applicants declined by just over 25% between 2015 and 2024.
    • Outbound migration to the US by Canadians is predominantly a “new” Canadian thing. In 2015, Canadian citizens born outside Canada made up 54% of those seeking certification, and by 2024 that proportion had increased to nearly 60%.
    • Among Canadians seeking US certification in 2015, 41% had a master’s or doctoral degree.  In 2024, that proportion had fallen to 31%.

    In other words, brain drain to the US changed significantly over the space of a decade: fewer Canadians headed south, and among those who did, declining proportions were Canadian-born or held advance degrees. All somewhat surprising.

    The second paper, Fields of study and occupations of immigrants who were international students in Canada before immigration by Youjin Choi and Li Xu, divides out two recent cohorts (2011-15 and 2016-21) of immigrants and starts to tease out various aspects of their current status in Canada.  Here the key findings were:

    • In the 2011-15 period, 13% of all immigrants were former international students. By the 2016-21 period, that number had risen to 23%.
    • About a third of immigrants who were students in Canada say their highest degree was taken outside Canada. It’s a bit difficult to parse this. It may mean, for instance, that they obtained a bachelor’s degree in Canada, went to another country for their master’s degree and came back; it may also mean that they took a master’s degree abroad and took some kind of short post-graduate certificate here.
    • A little over a third of all immigrants who studied in Canada have a STEM degree, a proportion that increased a tiny bit over time. This is higher than for the Canadian-born population, but not hugely different from that of immigrants who did not study here.
    • A little under half of all former international STEM students in the immigrant pool were working in a STEM field, but this is strongly correlated with the level of education. Among sub-Bachelor’s graduates this proportion was a little over 20%, while among those with a Master’s degree or higher it was over 50%. This is significantly higher than it is for Canadian-born post-secondary graduates. In non-STEM fields, the relationship is reversed (i.e. Canadian-born graduates are more likely to be working in an aligned field).

    In other words, former international students are a rising proportion of all immigrants, a high proportion are STEM graduates, and a high proportion of them go on to work in STEM fields. All signs that policy is pushing results in the intended direction.

    The final paper, Retention of science, technology, engineering, mathematics and computer science graduates in Canada by Youjin Choi and Feng Hou, follows three cohorts of both domestic and international student graduates to see whether they stayed in the country (technically, it measures the proportion of graduates who file tax returns in Canada, which is a pretty good proxy for residency). The results are summed up in one incredibly ugly chart (seriously, why is StatsCan dataviz so awful?), which I reproduce below:

    So, in the chart the Y-axis is the percentage of STEM graduates who stay in Canada (measured by the proxy of tax filing) and the X-axis is years since graduation. Since they are following three different cohorts of graduates, the lines don’t all extend to the same length (the earliest cohort could be followed for ten years, the middle for seven and the most recent for just three).  The red set of lines represents outcomes for Canadian-born students and the blue set of lines does the same for international students.

    So, the trivial things this graph shows are that: i) both Canadian and international students leave Canada but ii) international students do so more frequently and iii) leaving the country is something that happens gradually over time. The interesting thing it shows, though, is that the most recent cohort (class of 2018) of STEM graduates are more likely to stay than earlier ones, and that this is especially true for international students: the retention rate of international graduates from the class of 2018 was almost fifteen percentage points higher than for the class of 2015.

    Was it a more welcoming economy? Maybe. But you’d have to think that our system of offering international students a path to citizenship had something to do with it too.

    Two other nuggets in the paper:

    • Canadian-born STEM graduates are slightly more likely to leave than non-STEM graduates (it’s not a huge difference, just a percentage point or two) while among international student graduates, those from STEM programs are substantially less likely to leave than those from non-STEM fields (a fifteen-point gap or more).
    • Regardless of where they are from, and regardless of what they studied, graduates from “highly-ranked” universities (no definition given, unfortunately) were more likely to leave Canada, presumably because degree prestige confers a certain degree of mobility.

    You are now fully up to date on the latest data on domestic and international graduates and their immigration pathways. Enjoy your day.

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  • How About Grade 13? | HESA

    How About Grade 13? | HESA

    Hey everyone, quick bit of exciting Re: University news before we get started. Our speakers are beginning to go live on the site here. We’ll be shouting them out on the blog over the next few weeks, so watch this space. Also, a huge thanks to our many dynamic partners and sponsors for making it all happen, check them out here. And of course, thank you to everyone who has already grabbed a ticket, we are already 75% sold out and we are looking forward to having some very interesting conversations with you in January. Anyway, on with the blog…

    Question:  What policy would increase student preparation for post-secondary education, thus lowering dropouts and average time-to-completion while at the same time lowering per-student delivery costs?

    Answer: Introducing (or re-introducing) Grade 13 and move (or return) to make 3-year degrees the norm.

    It’s a policy that has so many benefits it’s hard to count them all. 

    Let’s start with the basic point that older students on the whole are better-prepared students. In North America, we ask students to grow up and make decisions about academics and careers awfully early. In some parts of the world, they deal with this by having students take “gap years” to sort themselves out. In North America we are very Calvinist (not the good kind) about work and study, and think of tie off just to mature and think as “wasteful”, so we drive them from secondary school to university/college as fast as possible. 

    But there’s no reason that the line between secondary and post-secondary education needs to be where it is today. In antebellum America, the line was in people’s early teens; and age 18 wasn’t an obvious line until after World War II (Martin Luther King Jr. started at Morehead College age 15 because it decided to start taking high school juniors). The Philippines drew the line after 10 years of schooling until about six years ago. Ontario’s elimination of grade 13 was one of the very few examples anywhere in the world of a jurisdiction deciding to roll the age of transition backwards.

    But it’s not clear in Ontario – which has now run this experiment for nearly 25 years – that the system is better off if you make students go to post-secondary education at 18 rather than 19. If you give students an extra year to mature, they probably have a better sense of what specific academic subjects actually consist of and how they lead to various careers. Because they have a better sense of what they want to do with their lives, they study with more purpose. They are more engaged. And almost everything we know about students suggests that more engaged students are easier to teach, switch programs less often, and drop out less frequently. 

    These all seem like good outcomes that we threw away for possibly no good reason.

    Students would spend another year at home. Not all of them would enjoy that, but their parents’ pocket-books sure would. They’d also spend one more year in classes of approximately thirty instead of classes of approximately three hundred. Again, this seems like a good thing.

    And as for cost, well, the per-student cost of secondary education is significantly lower than that of the per-student cost of post-secondary education. I don’t just mean for families, for whom the cost of secondary school is zero. I also mean for governments who are footing the bill for the post-secondary part of the equation, too (at least this is the case everywhere outside Ontario, which has abysmal levels of per-student spending on public post-secondary education). 

    There really is only one problem with moving from a 6+6+4 system of education to a 6+7+3 system.  It’s not that a three-year degree is inherently bad or inadequate. Quebec has a 6+5+2+3 system and as far as I know no one complains. Hell, most of Europe, and to some extent Manitoba, are on a 6+6+3 system and no one blinks. 

    No, the problem is space. Add another year of secondary school and you need bigger secondary schools. And no one is likely to want to get into that, particularly when the system is already bursting – in most of the country, particularly in western Canada – from a wave of domestic enrolments. It is possible that some universities and colleges could convert some of their space to house high schools (the University of Winnipeg has quite a nice one in Wesley Hall), but that wouldn’t be a universal solution. Architecture and infrastructure in this case act as a limiting factor on policy change. However, by the early-to-mid 2030s when secondary student and then post-secondary numbers level off or even start to decline again, that excuse will be gone. Why wouldn’t we consider this?

    (Technically another potential solution here of is to adopt something like a CEGEP, since these which arguably bridge the gap between secondary and university better that grade 13 did. But the real estate/infrastructure demands of creating a new class of institutions probably make that a non-starter).

    Anyways, this is just idle talk. This might be a complete waste of time and money, of course. My suggestions about possible benefits could be totally off. Interestingly, as far as I know, Ontario never did a post-policy implementation review about eliminating grade 13/Ontario Academic Credits. Did we gain or lose as a society? What were the cost implications? Seems like the kind of questions to which you’d want to know the answers (well, I wish I lived in a country that thought these were questions worth answering, anyway). And even if we thought there were benefits to keeping students out of post-secondary for one more year, architectural realities would almost certainly get in the way. 

    But if we’re genuinely interested in thinking about re-making systems of education, these are the sorts of questions we should be asking. Take nothing for granted.

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  • Focus Friday: September 26 | HESA

    Focus Friday: September 26 | HESA

    Hi everyone,

    Tiffany here.

    A quick reminder that Focus Friday kicks off today (Sept 26) at 12:30-1:30pm Eastern on the Future of Higher Education. I’m being joined by Jackie Pichette from RBC and Sunny Chan from Business + Higher Education Roundtable. If you haven’t registered yet, it isn’t too late. Sign up here.

    This is a new initiative from HESA but the session is simple: we’ll start with some questions to our invited guests, then open the floor for a coffee-chat style discussion. Bring your ideas, hang out, and learn something new.

    Two weeks ago, we asked for what you want to chat about during Focus Friday and thank you to everyone who already submitted suggestions for future topics! Here’s what you told us you want to hear about most:

    • AI and Technology: by far the top theme (teaching, learning, admissions, student support, policy, and the future of work).
    • Internationalization: Canada’s future strategy and global comparisons.
    • Funding & Finance: enrolment pressures, revenue models, government funding.
    • Student Experience & Equity: belonging, value perception, well-being.
    • Politics & Governance: provincial/federal expectations, US political spillovers, policy changes as they happen.
    • Academic Programming & Curriculum: innovation in credentials, Quality Assurance reform (one of my favourite topics, so thanks for saying it).
    • Plus: a variety of topics we’ll touch on throughout the year.

    Keep sharing your ideas in the Zoom Registration Form or reach out anytime at [email protected].

    From here on, the Focus Friday emails will give a summary of the last discussion. Can’t make the session or simply one of our text-loving audience members? We got you.

    The next Focus Friday will be on October 10th focused on the student experience and student life. I’ll be bringing you some folks directly from your own campuses to lead our discussion. Register via the big green box below.

    Looking forward to these conversations with you!

    Cheers,

    Tiff

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  • Turning the Corner | HESA

    Turning the Corner | HESA

    Things have been bleak in higher education the last couple of years, and no doubt they will remain bleak for a while. But it recently became clear to me how we’ll know that we are turning the corner: it will be the moment when provincial governments start allowing significant rises in domestic tuition.

    This became clear to me when I was having a discussion with a senior provincial official (in a province I shall not name) about tuition. I was arguing that with provincial budgets flat and declining international enrolment, domestic tuition needed to increase – and that there was plenty of room to do so given the affordability trends of the last couple of decades.

    What affordability trends, you ask? I’m glad you asked. Affordability is a ratio where the cost of a good or service is the numerator and some measure of ability to pay is the denominator. So, let’s look at what it takes to pay average tuition and fees. Figure 1 shows average tuition as a percentage of the median income of couple families and lone-parent families aged 45-54.  As you can see, for the average two-couple household, average tuition (which – recall last Wednesday’s blog – is an overestimate for most students) has never been more affordable in the twenty-first century. For lone-parent families, current levels of tuition are at a twenty-year low.

    Figure 1: Average Undergraduate Tuition and Fees as a Percentage of Median Family Income, Couple Family and Lone-Parent Families aged 45-54, Canada, 2000-2024

    Ah, you say, but that’s tuition as a function of parental ability-to-pay – what about students? Well, it’s basically the same story – calculated as a percentage of the average student wage, tuition has not been this cheap since the turn of the century, and in Ontario, it has dropped by 27% since 2017. And yes, the national story is to a large degree a function of what’s been going on in Ontario, but over the past decade or so, this ratio has been declining in all provinces except Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta.

    Figure 2: Number of Hours Worked at Median Hourly Income for Canadians Aged 15-24 Required to pay Average Undergraduate Tuition and Fees, Canada and Ontario, 1997-2024

    And that’s before we even touch the issue of student aid, which as you all know is way up this century even after we take student population growth into account. In real dollars, we’ve gone from a $10B/year student aid system to a $20B/year system with the vast majority of growth coming on the non-repayable side, rather than from loans.

    Figure 3: Total Student Financial Assistance by Type, Selected years, 1993-94 to 2023-2024, in Millions, in $2023

    In fact, student aid expenditures are so high nowadays that across both universities and colleges we spend about $3 billion more in student aid than we take in from tuition fees. That’s NEGATIVE NET TUITION, PEOPLE.

    Figure 4: Aggregate Non-Repayable Aid vs Aggregate Domestic Tuition fees, 2007-08 to 2023-24, in Billions, in $2023

    So, yeah, affordability trends. They are much more favorable to students than most people think.

    Anyway, the provincial official seemed a bit nonplussed by my reply: my sense is that they had never been briefed on the degree to which tuition increases have been thrown into reverse these past few years, and he certainly didn’t know about the huge increase in non-repayable aid over the past few decades. They didn’t push back on any of this evidence, BUT, they insisted, tuition fees weren’t going up because doing so is hard and it’s unpopular.

    To which I responded: well, sure. But was raising tuition any easier or less unpopular in 1989 when the Quebec Liberal government more than doubled tuition? Than in the mid-90s when both the NDP and Conservative governments allowed tuition to rise? Than in 2001 when the BC Liberals allowed tuition to increase by 50%? This has been done before. There’s absolutely no reason it can’t be done again. The only thing it will take is the courage to put the requirements of institutions that actually build economies and societies ahead of the cheap, short-term sugar highs of chasing things like “affordability”. 

    Now, to be fair, I don’t for the moment see any provincial governments prepared to do this. If there is one thing that seems to unite provincial governments these days, it is an inability to make hard decisions. But this particular political moment won’t last forever. It might take a serious, long-term recession to knock it into various heads that no matter how much money we sink into them, natural resources and construction alone won’t run this economy. Eventually, we’re going to have to re-build the great college and university system we’re in the middle of trashing. 

    And we’ll know that moment has come when provincial governments agree that domestic tuition should rise again.

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  • Fun with Tuition Data | HESA

    Fun with Tuition Data | HESA

    I want to show you something kind of intriguing about how tuition is changing in Canada.

    By now you might be familiar with a chart that looks like Figure 1, which shows average tuition, exclusive of ancillary fees (which would tack another $900-1000 on to the total), in constant $2024. The story it shows is one of persistent real increases from up until 2017-18, at which point, mainly thanks to policy changes in Ontario, tuition falls sharply and continues to fall as tuition increases across the country failed to keep up with inflation in the COVID years. Result: average tuition today, in real terms, is about where it was in 2012-13.  

    Figure 1: Average Undergraduate Tuition Fee, Canada, in $2024, 2006-07 to 2024-25

    Simple story, right? Boring, even.  

    But then, just for fun, I decided to look at tuition at the level of individual fields of study. And what I found was kind of interesting. Take a look at Figure 2, which shows average tuition in what you might call the university’s three “core” areas: social science, humanities, and physical/life sciences. It’s quite a different story. The pre-2018 rise was never as pronounced as it was for tuition overall, and the drop in tuition post-2018 was more pronounced. As a result, tuition in the humanities is about even with where it was in 2006 and in the sciences is now three percent lower than it was in 2006.

    Figure 2: Average Undergraduate Tuition Fee by Field of Study, Canada, in $2024, 2006-07 to 2024-25

    This got me thinking: how is it possible that the overall average tuition is rising so quickly when so many big disciplines are showing so little change? So I looked at the change in each discipline from 2006-07 to 2024-25. Figures 3 and 4 show the 18-year change in tuition for direct- and second-entry programs (and yes, this is an admittedly English Canadian distinction, since the programs in Figure 4 are also at least partially direct entry in Quebec).

    Figure 3: Change in Real Tuition Levels, direct-entry undergraduate programs, Canada, 2006-07 to 2024-25

    Figure 4: Change in Real Tuition Levels, second-entry undergraduate programs, Canada, 2006-07 to 2024-25

    Two very different pictures, right? Quite clearly, second-entry degrees – which are a tiny fraction of overall enrolments – are nevertheless dragging the overall average up quite a bit. Unfortunately, it’s not easy to work out exactly how much because – inexplicably – Statscan does not use the same field of study boundaries for enrolment and tuition. But, near as I can figure out, there are about 15,000 students in law in Canada, 5,000 in pharmacy, 3,000 in dentistry and 2,000 in veterinary science. So that’s 25,000 students (or 2% of the undergraduate total) in fields with very high tuition increases, and a little back-of-the-envelope math suggests that these increases for just 2% of the student body were responsible for about 15% of all tuition growth.  

    Now, there is one other thing you have to look at and that is what is going on in engineering. This field has the fastest-growing real tuition over the period (26%) but is also the fastest-growing field in terms of domestic student enrolments (up 56% over the same period, compared to 16% for universities as a whole). So, compared with a world where engineering enrolments stayed steady between 2006-07 and 2024-25, an extra 22,000 people voluntarily enrolled in a field of study which was both more expensive (compared to science, average engineering tuition is about $2500 higher) and increasingly so every year. Again, a little back-of-the-envelope math shows that this phenomenon was responsible for between 10 and 11% of the growth in overall average tuition.  

    So, let’s add all that up: about a quarter of all the real growth in tuition over the past 20 years (which, as we noted at the outset wasn’t all that much to begin with) was due to tuition growth in the country’s most expensive programs. These are programs which are either growing rapidly or have long waiting lists, so I think the argument that these tuition increases have deterred enrolment is a bit far-fetched. And it means that the vast majority of students are seeing tuition fees which are well below the “average”. In fact, by my calculations, the actual increase in real dollars for that portion of the student body in first-degree programs – bar engineering – is somewhere around $625 in eighteen years.

    Affordability crisis? Not really.

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  • Born on Third Base | HESA

    Born on Third Base | HESA

    Cast your minds back to January of 2024, when the federal government suddenly decided that housing was an issue, international students were the problem and implemented a complicated and irritating-to-implement set of caps that were 35% lower nationally than for 2023 (and in Ontario significantly more than that). Then, in 2025 came another set of changes including a 10% cut in the national limit. And then, on top of that, a set of new conditions on post-graduate work visas were imposed which were specifically designed to depress demand for certain types of education.

    To the extent that the world outside post-secondary education absorbed this news and didn’t dismiss it outright because Ontario colleges in particular “deserved it” for pouring gasoline onto a housing shortage bonfire, the reaction to all this was: “boy, losing nearly half your international students is really going to lead to a financial pinch”. But this reaction was wrong in two ways. First, that 50-percent was an average – in most cases, institutions either saw drops that were either significantly higher or significantly lower than that. Partly, this was because the federal government designed the cap drop to hit provinces unequally (Ontario to the max and Quebec not at all, for instance) and part of it had to do with the fact that some provinces distributed the cap hit in some peculiar ways (see back here for an earlier blog on this).

    But second, and most importantly, not many institutions actually even met these significantly-lowered quotas. Talk to folks in institutions these days and they will tell you that it’s not that the caps are too low, but that demand for Canadian post-secondary has simply dried up: no one wants to come to Canada anymore. I believe this. Former Immigration Minister Marc Miller did a serious number on the reputation of Canada’s post-secondary. If you go around accusing institutions of fraud and deceit and imposing clampdowns on student visas (it wasn’t just the caps – visa processing times are up and visa refusal rates are rising too), foreign students might get the idea that the country doesn’t want them, and so they never apply in the first place. I am sure Marc Miller would deny ever wanting to dry up demand, but it is exactly what his ham-fisted, Attila-the-Hun in a China shop approach to student visas managed to achieve.

    (And still, so many bien-pensant people think Liberals are the good guys on higher education. Or think more federal involvement in the higher education file would be a good thing. God Save Us All.)

    Anyways, as a result of this, universities and colleges are in a funk and wondering if and when international students will come back and (partially) save their bacon, financially speaking. But what is shocking, to me at least, is how unbelievably passive the sector is. They are waiting for students to come. Just waiting. ‘Why don’t they come?’ people ask. ‘It’s that darn Marc Miller! Nothing we can do about it’.

    You see the problem with the international student industry in Canada is that institutions themselves never grew an overseas recruitment game the way UK and Australian institutions did. By the time Canadian institutions started thinking about the whole international-students-as-revenue thing, the feds had already created the student-to-permanent immigration pathway via our post-graduate work visas and the like. And then, when things got hotter, aggregators like ApplyBoard came along and made it so easy to attract students that a lot of Canadian institutions just never upped their ground game on student recruitment.

    You see, despite Canadian institutions’ tendency to congratulate themselves on their “international outlook” and their ability to attract international students, very few of them ever bothered to go deep either on recruitment tactics (spending time abroad, juicing the recruitment pipeline) or on paying attention to the international student experience on campus. Some did, of course, but I can count the number who would be considered on par with the top institutions in the anglosphere on one hand.

    When it comes to internationalization, Canada is the kid who was born on third base and thinks they hit a triple. So many unearned advantages. And so, when Attila-the-Minister came along and took away most of those unearned advantages, people did not know what to do. The simple answer – UP YOUR GROUND GAME IN A FEW KEY TARGET MARKETS FOR GOD’S SAKE – seems not to have been considered very widely.

    I suspect one of the reasons for this is a deeply unsexy one: internal funding formulas for non-academic units. You see, under the enshittification model that is widely prevalent in Canadian institutions (more so in universities than colleges, but the latter aren’t immune from it), when a budget crunch happens, everyone needs to cut back. And so, international units, far from being given more money to go fight for students in overseas markets, sometimes have to scale back their activities (or at least not increase them as they should). The idea that it takes money to make money does not fit easily with a budget model that bases this year’s budget on what you got last year plus or minus a percentage point or two.

    This is bananas, of course. Self-destructive, even. But even if you gave international offices more money, they wouldn’t necessarily know how to spend it. The born-on-third-base thing meant we never needed to fight that hard for international students – they just kind of showed up. The situation Canadian institutions are in right now requires a lot more bodies on the ground overseas, understanding individual city markets, developing relationships with schools and agents, and attending more fairs, in more cities and more countries. This is how Australia and the UK developed their international markets. We managed to skip a lot of that in the ‘10s. We are going to have to learn it now.

    The shock, pain and impact of both the visa caps and Marc Miller setting fire to the country’s reputation are all real. Never forgive, never forget (but also: never again wish for the federal government to be more active in post-secondary education). But institutions are not without agency here. My feeling is that in too many cases they are just throwing up their hands, either because they prefer not to spend on recruitment or are insufficiently skilled at doing so in the absence of a cuddly national image or an absurdly favorable visa system.  

    You want markets? Invest in them. Fight for them. If Canadian post-secondary education is as good as everyone claims it is, students will come. Passiveness helps no one.

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  • Introducing Focus Friday | HESA

    Introducing Focus Friday | HESA

    Hi everyone,

    I’m excited to share a new initiative we’re launching this fall: Focus Friday.

    Focus Friday is a biweekly webinar series that brings people together around some of the most pressing issues in higher education. Each session runs for an hour and features a few short conversations with invited guests, followed by an open, coffee-chat style discussion where everyone can join in.

    The goal is simple: create space to share ideas, meet new people across the sector, and learn from one another. We especially encourage you to join sessions on topics that may be outside your usual focus as sometimes that’s where the most interesting insights emerge.

    Over the course of this initiative, we’ll be diving into themes like current enrolment trends, student experience, the future of research, and even integrating elements of our AI-CADEMY programming into the series. If you’re doing something exciting in any of these areas, I’d love to hear from you. There’s a suggestion box built directly into the Zoom registration form, and you can always drop me a line at [email protected].

    In each Focus Friday, you’ll receive the Zoom registration link for the next session. For example, below you will find the link to register for our first full session on September 26 from 12:30–1:30pm Eastern.

    I’m excited to chat with you!

    Cheers,

    Tiff

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  • Five Rules for 2025-26 | HESA

    Five Rules for 2025-26 | HESA

    Morning all. 

    It’s been a busy summer at HESA Towers. We’ve been developing Boardwise, our new suite of governance products with our partners at Balsam Advisory, and exploring new ideas on data governance and analytics with our friends at Plaid Analytics. We’ve also been touring the country with the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) Thought Leadership Office and the Business +  Higher Education Roundtable (BHER) to talk about higher education, economic growth and productivity. The “what we heard” document from those sessions will be out in mid-September, and there are several follow-up events scheduled, including a leaders’ summit hosted by RBC later this month. This event will focus mainly on how higher education and business can work together to tackle some of the country’s most pressing challenges, such as clean energy and technology, artificial intelligence, and defence. Further insights from this work will also be explored at the BHER Executive Summit in February 2026.

    And, of course, our own Re: University conference – where we will be presenting some of the most interesting ideas out there to improve and inspire the quality, effectiveness and experience of postsecondary education in Canada – is coming up in late January in Ottawa. (Tickets are going fast – reserve your spot!)

    A couple of other small programming notes: 

    • The State of Post-Secondary Education in Canada 2025 will be released tomorrow. 
    • The World of Higher Educationpodcast will still come out every Thursday, but we’re back to an audio-only format because editing is a hassle and apparently very few of you are videophiles. 
    • The Fifteen will continue to bring you the top global higher education stories every other week. 
    • Next Friday will mark the debut of a new biweekly webinar series, Friday Focus, to be hosted by Tiffany MacLennan, surfacing the most interesting shifts and innovations in Canadian higher education – from AI & technology, cutting-edge programming, and the everchanging student experience – through the voices of those leading the change. We hope you can join us. 
    • Our University Vice Presidents Network (UVPN) is going strong and is scheduled to convene in Victoria in November, Quebec City in February, and then internationally for a May 2026 Study Tour in Germany. 
    • Finally, we are targeting the first week of December for the launch of the World of Higher Education Annual Review 2025, a new year-in-review publication which tries to document the year’s shifts across the whole of our crazy sector, right around the globe, using statistics, stories and strategic planning documents.

    Now, on to the year ahead.

    In most places, I think the hard part for colleges is over.  2025-26 isn’t going to be an easy year, by any means, but the big decisions have mostly been made, future directions have been set and the floor on institutional income has either been reached or is in sight. 

    Universities, on the other hand, are a different story.  They have – not everywhere, but in the main – been more hesitant to act. It’s a conservative sector that is resistant to change, be it financial, organizational or cultural. And the financial problems the sector faces – again, not everywhere but in the main – are going to drag on for quite awhile mainly because international student numbers aren’t bouncing back the way they might have (more on that next week) and because an imminent recession is the opposite of helpful when it comes to provincial finances.

    So, it’s going to be a tough year ahead.  In my mind, I think there are 5 rules for success.

    Rule 1 – Act like Universities are a Means to an End, not an End in Themselves.  Literally the worst thing universities can say right now is “universities are crucial, give us more money”. It’s an utterly tone-deaf approach, even if you give it an “elbows up” spin.  The sector has been saying it for years and it clearly hasn’t worked, so continuing with this approach is the literal definition of insanity. And the reason it doesn’t work is because Canadians (or at least Canadian politicians) simply don’t believe that universities are crucial because they don’t believe that knowledge and science is useful. Rather, they far prefer a Canada where the construction and natural resources industries continue to call the shots (if there is a Deep State in Canada, it is surely comprised of these two sectors and their watercarriers). The case we need to make is not “spend on universities”, it’s “a knowledge-driven Canada is a better Canada”.  And more importantly, it’s not a case institutions can make on their own – they need to make it with lots of other actors, particularly from industry.  Alliances, people. Form alliances.  Downsize your government relations team, build up your community relations efforts.

    Rule 2 – Stop with the Tri-Council Fundamentalism.  Federal budgets for research are going to get hammered in the coming months. This will make a lot of people argue that we should ditch all research funds except the tri-councils because inquiry-driven research is sacred etc. I understand the instinct here because so many institutions make council success a key part of the tenure/promotion process. But it’s a bad instinct. No one in Ottawa cares about your tenure processes. You can argue all you want about how basic research is more cost-efficient in terms of driving long-term discovery, but i) the public likes some short-term wins mixed in with the long-term ones and b) nobody outside universities is buying that one story about NSERC funding Geoffrey Hinton’s AI research 30 year ago as a business case for science. Like, nobody. Get over it. Understand that if there is to be growth in Canadian research funding in future, it’s going to look a lot more like Horizon Europe or the Biden Administration’s Chips and Science Act, both of which were widely hailed as being good for science despite – or perhaps because – they are largely mission-driven rather than inquiry-driven. If this is the hill the community chooses to die on, God help us all. 

    Rule 3 – Focus on what you can control, not what you can’t. Yes, things are bad.  You can spend time complaining about it – government is short-sighted, we’re always getting shafted by the granting councils, etc. – or you can get busy. Fire up your friend-raising and fund-raising. Ramp up your spend/effort on international recruitment (more on this next week). Make a big bang with some new programs that stand out. Go big on one theme. Stand out. Please.

    Rule 4 – Faster Collegiality is a Must. Part of regaining public confidence is going to involve being able to make changes at the institutional level with much more speed and determination than is historically the case. That means being able to deliver on promises and priority in the immediate term, not in some far-off future, to be able to act as an institution and not just as a sack full of cats fighting over research priorities and teaching schedules. The way this normally happens is to concentrate power in the hands of the upper administration. This is how it works in most of Asia, most of the United States, and increasingly in Europe as well (though crucially, senior admin tends to be elected in Europe). But it doesn’t have to be like that. There’s no obvious reason why collegial governance needs to be slow: it’s just custom and practice. I’ve been saying for a while that better, faster governance is key to institutions in rough times and while too few have heeded that advice, it’s never too late to start.

    Rule 5 – Do less, but do it better. Universities are ridiculously strung out. Many forces are at work here, but I will single out two. At a system level, we have governance systems that are great at approving new programs and initiatives but absolutely rotten at pruning them once they have outlived their purpose. Result: institutions do too much, but do it badly, thus leading to enshittifcation. But it works at the level of individual faculty too, since departments tend to hire the biggest keeners in the system, the kind of people who won’t say no to more research, or extra teaching, or whatever. Result: burnout. In a normal organization, a manager would come along and try to make workloads manageable. But since Canadian academia long ago decided that the main purpose of department chairs is to protect staff from unwanted Decanal or Provostial schemes rather than to manage academics’ workloads, there is no one in the system who can actually make the problem go away (high-sounding talk about “wellness” doesn’t do the trick either). So, seriously, do less.

    It’s going to be a hard year (or let’s face it, a hard few years), but if everyone gets the basics right, we can come out of this better and stronger. 

    Good luck everyone. Back to work!

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