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Macleans.ca

Canada’s magazine

Searching for a higher education strategy

Today, the good folks over at Higher Education Strategy Associates released their long-awaited analysis of the party platforms regarding post-secondary education. They were clearly rejigging parts of the analysis right up to the end – the document is larded with pictures of the party leaders taken from VintageVoter.ca.

Tiers of Academe

There’s been a lot of free-floating hand-wringing in the wake of a proposal to have Canada concentrate its research spending in a relatively few universities. Most of the complaints have been about the dangers of “elitism” — as if university was about something else. Canada already has a de facto two-tiered university system, and within each university, there is a two- if not three-tiered hierarchy of instructors. The solecism the five schools seem to have made is a) pointing it out, and b) suggesting that we might as well acknowledge the hierarchy and make our funding formulae reflect it.