Archive for Paul Wells

Why they got rid of the University of Western Ontario

Let’s begin with an annoying autobiographical pause: I studied at the University of Western Ontario. Well, “studied.” Anyway, onward:

There ‘s much fuss among alumni over the news that Western is changing its name, for most day-to-day purposes, to Western. Or Western University. Or Western University Canada.

What it won’t call itself, in colloquial use, is the University of Western Ontario. That remains the place’s legal name, but it won’t be the name Western travels with.

This is all causing a certain amount of consternation among people with a link to Western and, I think it’s fair to say, to people who follow branding exercises with a certain healthy amount of skepticism. Objections I heard this morning include:

1. This is dumb. Everyone calls it Western already.

2. This is dumb. It’s in Eastern Canada.

3. This is dumb. It’s in Southern Ontario.

To me, it’s not as dumb, but its cleverness takes a bit of explaining. Continue reading That’s Western University to you

Almost 700 Aboriginal students are enrolled at the University of Victoria

Increasingly it seems we must look to the University of Victoria for good ideas. This year’s Times Higher Education Supplement rankings put it sixth among Canadian universities and 130th in the world. UVic does well in our own rankings too, as you’ll see. Rankings were the first thing David Turpin, UVic’s president, wanted to talk about when he visited me in Ottawa last month. But his other story was more focused and may be more important: Victoria’s success in attracting, retaining and rewarding Aboriginal university students.

In 2006, only eight per cent of Canadians with Aboriginal ancestry had university degrees, compared with 23 per cent of non-Aboriginal Canadians. This is not merely too bad. There is a genuine economic and human cost, because the correlation between higher education and various social goods is exhaustively documented. Post-secondary education attainment is associated with better health, increased civic participation, lower crime rates, higher income, correspondingly higher tax payments, reduced dependence on social benefits, and more.

A February 2010 study by the Centre for the Study of Living Standards suggests that if the gap in educational attainment and labour-force participation between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians vanished by 2026, total tax revenue would increase by $3.5 billion and government spending could decrease by $14.2 billion. Obviously that won’t happen, but any progress in that direction helps. Never even mind the human benefits.

The best results I’ve seen in promoting access and achievement for Aboriginal students are from the University of Victoria. Some of this is a long-term trend. The university counted fewer than 100 Aboriginal students in 1999; today it’s nearly 700. The number of graduate students has grown from fewer than 10 to nearly 150.

Since 2005, UVic has been working on programs to solidify and extend those trends. With money from the Liberal-created, now-defunct Millennium Scholarship Foundation, the university came up with seven programs under a blanket name, the LE,NONET Project. (LE,NONET is pronounced “le-non-git.” It’s a Straits Salish word referring to success after enduring many hardships.) Most of the programs are for students. There’s a straightforward bursary program, which paid recipients an average of about $3,500 a year. There was also an “emergency relief fund.” Turpin told me some students were going home to their communities, say for a relative’s funeral, and not returning. Simply covering travel costs helped fix that, and at a cost lower than $600 per student per school year.

Finally, there were programs to keep the whole university experience from becoming too weird and foreign, for students who might be the first in their family to pursue higher education: a peer mentor program that matched young Aboriginal students with older Aboriginal students; a 200-hour internship with an Aboriginal community group outside the university gates; and a 200-hour research apprenticeship with a UVic faculty member. The project also included online counselling and workshops for staff and faculty members.

Did all this help Aboriginal students? They sure thought it did. Seventy-eight per cent thought the peer mentor program contributed to their success. Every other element of LE,NONET scored even higher. Almost 99 per cent liked the bursaries. Clear majorities said the program helped them feel connected both to the broader university community and to “who I am as an Aboriginal person.” Sometimes people suggest being a member of the First Nations and being at university are contradictory. Most LE,NONET participants disagree.

Bottom line: does all this fuss keep Aboriginal students in school? Participants in the program were less than one-third as likely to drop out as Aboriginal students who weren’t selected for the pilot program. They were more than twice as likely to continue from one year to the next. Graduation rates were significantly higher. It’s a safe bet that over their lifetimes those graduates will repay the extra investment many times over.

David Turpin says he’ll share details of the LE,NONET program with any university that’s interested. Many will be. Across the country, there’s been a recent and overdue emphasis on promoting access and success—getting students into university, and ensuring they get out with a degree—among under-represented groups. That includes Aboriginals, but also some immigrant populations and even, by some definitions, young men, who are entering university markedly less often than young women.

It should be obvious why this is all a good idea. An aging population needs higher productivity so a smaller workforce can pay for the benefits of ever more retirees. The needed human capital could come from immigrants, and a lot of it will. But it’s dumb to import brains when there are plenty of good minds right here that can succeed if only they’re given a fair chance and, yes, some extra help where appropriate.

Higher educational attainment needn’t make First Nations students feel forced to deny their identities. The skills and knowledge they acquire can go right to work in their home communities, or they can become part of a network that makes it that much easier for the next cohort of students to follow their example. It’s no coincidence that one of the country’s fastest-rising universities is the one that has pushed all these considerations to the top of its agenda.

What the big thinkers know, what they’re trying to learn, and how close we may be to a genuine revolution

Not even the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ont., is immune to the rhythms of the seasons. Summer there this year was quiet and casual, with several regular faces away on vacation. And yet there were plenty of signs that the little think tank is heading into an ambitious new era.

Stephen Hawking was on a six-week working visit from Cambridge, England. Every day you could see a caregiver pushing his wheelchair along the footpaths outside the building at surprising speed. The most famous scientist in the world does not like to dawdle. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis has left him no control over most of his body. Twitching a cheek muscle to compose even a short sentence with his speech synthesizer can take 20 minutes. So he is keenly aware of wasted time. “I encouraged lots of people to go and talk to him,” Neil Turok, Perimeter’s South African director and a Hawking friend and colleague of long standing, told me.

“A lot of people did. Several of them came away saying, ‘I went and explained to him what I’m doing—and he didn’t seem very interested!’ I entirely sympathize with him. He has very high standards and if you start telling him something that doesn’t sound plausible he’ll very quickly tell you, ‘I’ve had enough.’ ”

Leonard Susskind, a white-bearded and soft-spoken Stanford University prof, was on a similar extended visit. Susskind has no human story of physical courage to match Hawking’s, but to physicists he is in Hawking’s intellectual class. He is a pioneer in the surreal but influential field of string theory, which describes a universe made of tiny vibrating strings curled up across many more dimensions than the three we know. Hawking and Susskind are two of Perimeter’s 20 Distinguished Research Chairs, eminent international theorists who visit Waterloo occasionally to work without the distractions of home.

Susskind spent much of his time in the third-floor lounge surrounded by groups of young scientists still in graduate school or fresh out. They would show Susskind their work, neat lines of equations on notepaper or hectic scrawls on the lounge’s blackboard. (Perimeter has hundreds of blackboards, in every office, conference room and coffee nook. They all get a lot of use.) Susskind’s questions would make his young visitors stare at the paper or blackboard for long minutes, as if hoping an answer would appear.

The day I arrived, the inaugural class of Perimeter Scholars International (PSI), an intensive master’s-level course in theoretical physics for students from around the world, held their convocation after a year’s intensive study. One of the most impressive was Bruno Le Floch, a 20-year-old ponytailed Frenchman who was one of the younger students in his class. “He’s just a genius,” Turok said. But he is also just a kid. So rather than dive into a theory career, Le Floch will spend the next year teaching in Cape Town at the African Institute for Mathematical Studies, which Turok founded in hopes of giving Africa’s best students a reason to stay at home and lead the continent’s intellectual development.

One day Stephen Harper visited Perimeter to announce a $20-million federal investment in Turok’s African initiative. One rarely has to wait long at Perimeter before somebody comes along with a gift of money. Often the visitor is a local boy who made good, Mike Lazaridis, the founder and co-CEO of Research in Motion.

Years ago, Lazaridis decided to put much of his fortune into an institute that would study the questions that fascinated him when he was a University of Waterloo engineering student. On one hand, Einstein’s theories of space, time and gravity. On the other, the odd but powerful insights of quantum mechanics. In 2000, with $100 million from Lazaridis and $20 million from two other RIM partners, the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics set up shop in the old post office building on King Street.

Since then it has grown steadily. In 2004, Perimeter moved into a slate-black 6,000-sq.-m building on the shore of Silver Lake in Waterloo Park. Already this summer, work crews were building an extension that will nearly double the institute’s floor space. Its faculty size will triple.

(Current full-time faculty is only 11, but if you add faculty it shares with area universities, visiting scholars, post-docs and graduate students, there are about 100 people thinking in the building on an ordinary day, and often about as many stopping through for a conference or seminar.) Enrolment at Perimeter Scholars International will double. The Distinguished Research Chairs will grow in number to 30.

But what do the people at Perimeter actually do? Many assume the institute must be the research and development branch of Research in Motion. This is not even remotely true. There are no laboratories at Perimeter. It has no equipment for manufacturing anything. There is very little in the sleek four-storey building except boxes of chalk and an excellent bistro.

But establishing what the Perimeter theorists don’t do is easier than explaining what they do.

Even they have learned to leave it vague. “When the neighbours ask, I say I just want to understand why the universe works the way it does,” said Chris Fuchs, a tremendously engaging Texan who has been a visiting scholar at Perimeter since 2007. “And that’s when they usually say, ‘Isn’t it great that Stephen Hawking’s there?’ And I say, ‘Yeah, it is.’ ”

What Perimeter’s theorists do is think, singly and in groups. Sometimes they scribble equations on the chalkboards to enlist colleagues and visitors in their attempts to solve some new or nagging riddle. Once I passed Fuchs’s office on my way to the third-floor pop machine. He was staring intently, slack-jawed, at the chalkboard that makes up one wall of his office. When I returned 20 minutes later he had not moved.

What they think about, from assorted conceptual angles that make up the subdisciplines of modern theoretical physics, are ways to refine, extend and, ideally, reconcile the two great early 20th-century advances in physics—general relativity and quantum mechanics. Relativity refers to Albert Einstein’s realization that space and time are aspects of the same thing, as are matter and energy. Einstein described how massive bodies like stars warp the space-time around them, bending the fabric of existence in a way we experience as gravity.

Quantum mechanics is the product of research into the behaviour of the component parts of atoms by Einstein’s contemporaries—Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger and others. What they found is so odd it still puzzles physicists. A particle can sometimes be in one place and, in a way, somewhere else at the same time. Observing a particle to find out where it is destroys any chance of knowing for sure where it’s going. Two particles can become “entangled” so that a change to one particle will be reflected in a change to the other, no matter how distant.

In nearly a century of investigation, researchers have made great use of these odd insights. Electronics depends on the quantum behaviour of electrons moving through semiconductors. The same phenomena drive lasers, DVD players, computers, electron microscopes. The Nobel-winning physicist Leon Lederman has said that quantum mechanics is responsible for one-third of U.S. GDP.

If you unleash some of those hundreds of millions of minds you help Africa and you help the world.

Stephen Hawking at the Perimeter Institute

Last Sunday an array of VIPs—Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, Kevin O’Leary, the angry guy on the CBC reality show Dragons’ Den—convened in a theatre at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo to pay tribute to Stephen Hawking. The British astrophysicist sat in his wheelchair while the politicians buttered him up. Then he delivered a lecture through his speech synthesizer about his early years in physics.

The next day a bunch of physicists took a lunch break from a conference where they were discussing what happens when black holes of various sizes orbit each other. A caregiver pushed Hawking to a place at one of the cafeteria tables, where he ate some lunch and listened to the chatter and gossip among his colleagues.

There were no cameras or dignitaries at the lunch. I was there only by chance. But in some ways this was more significant than the previous day’s pomp. Hawking didn’t become the world’s most famous physicist by giving lectures, after all, but by thinking and working, and he is at Perimeter to think and work.

He is one of 10 Distinguished Research Chairs, leading international scholars who will camp out periodically at Perimeter and work with its faculty and students. He’s about halfway through his first six-week visit. On evenings and weekends he gets out to sight-see. So far he’s gone to African Lion Safari and enjoyed the ribs at Ethel’s Lounge.

Days are for discussion and calculation. Motor neuron disease slows him but doesn’t stop him. He controls his computer by twitching his cheek to control the cursor on a computer screen. It works best if you frame questions to him as a yes or a no. Neil Turok, Perimeter’s director, is an old Cambridge colleague of Hawking’s. He admitted after Sunday’s big televised show that he was impatient for the fancy business to be done “so we can get back to work.”

Of course in its own way, Sunday’s glamour was work too. A lot of taxpayer money has gone into Perimeter, about $90 million from the feds and as much from the Ontario government since 1999. That’s on top of $170 million from Research in Motion founder Mike Lazaridis. The physics that goes on there is so hard to explain (quantum foundations, anyone? Superstring theory?) that constant effort goes into underlining its importance. The man in the wheelchair is handy to that effort. After his speech, Hawking joined Turok and Lazaridis at dinner with two federal ministers, Flaherty and Gary Goodyear, both plainly starstruck.

O’Leary also became part of the sales pitch. “Imagine in 1905,” Lazaridis told the audience, “if Albert Einstein had stood in the Dragons’ Den.” Would the business geniuses have funded his crazy ideas? Not likely. But that’s what’s needed today, Lazaridis argued.

That’s the point Hawking wanted to make too, as it turned out. Sort of. Mostly he used his own life to show that you can never know what you’ll need to know. Governments spend a lot of time trying to pick winners in science. Hawking, the greatest winner of his lifetime, has never even bothered to try. He just followed his heart.

He showed up at Cambridge in 1962 hoping to study the nature of the universe with Dennis Hoyle. “Cosmology was at that time hardly recognized as a legitimate field. Yet that was where I wanted to do my research.” Hoyle was too busy so Hawking fetched up with a lesser-known prof, which came in handy when Hoyle’s defence of a steady-state universe fell into dispute soon after.

All the action was in elementary particle physics, where you could design experiments to peck away at electrons and nucleii and eke out their secrets. Cosmology was mere guesswork. Hawking quoted a colleague who considered attendees at a 1962 Warsaw conference on general relativity to be “hosts of dopes.”

Hawking’s instincts ran all the other way. Elementary particles? “Too like botany.” Hushed admiration for odd species of quarks and gluons. “Cosmology and gravitation, on the other hand, were neglected fields that were ripe for development.”

By the late 1960s, data from radio telescopes had driven a stake through Hoyle’s steady-state hypothesis. With Roger Penrose and other colleagues, Hawking was hot on the trail of proof that the universe began with a big bang. “It was a glorious feeling, having a whole field virtually to ourselves. How unlike particle physics, where people were falling over themselves to latch onto the latest idea. They still are.”

A single-minded focus on pursuing the latest trends would never have got him where he wound up. “The importance of special places and special times cannot be overstated,” Hawking said. “That happened in Berlin, Germany, in the 1920s when quantum mechanics was born, and again in Cambridge in the 1960s. It seems to me that the same ingredients are being assembled here,” at Perimeter. “I am hoping and expecting great things will happen here.”

What’s important is not that Hawking said these nice things but that he was in Waterloo to say them. And with that, it was back to work.

Canada’s leading universities want to, but big dreams call for big changes

There’s a paradox to being the president of a large Canadian university: on most days you get to feel more influential and more powerless than most people can imagine.

In next week’s Maclean’s, we’ll talk with the presidents of Canada’s five largest universities about the challenges they face, and what they think needs fixing in our university system. It’s first worth examining, however, just how big a footprint these five make in Canada, and how Canadian universities in general stack up internationally. The institutions in question—the University of British Columbia, University of Alberta, University of Toronto, McGill University, and the Université de Montréal—are an elite bunch. They have nearly 22 per cent of Canada’s undergraduate student enrolment and produce nearly 45 per cent of the country’s doctorates.

There are nearly 100 universities in Canada, depending how you count it, but these five alone receive 46 per cent of all the money Canada’s main granting councils disburse for research every year. They receive an even larger share—47 per cent—of the money the Canada Foundation for Innovation pays to build new labs and research infrastructure.

At their best, Canada’s largest universities—call them the “G5” as they sometimes refer to themselves in private—have shown a dedication to quality, not just quantity. All by itself, the University of Toronto counts 17 of the 27 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences who serve on Canadian university faculties, and nearly half the country’s Gairdner International Award winners and Guggenheim Fellows. The future is built in these institutions.

Which is not to say they are immune to the headaches of the present. First, they face the problem every university president faces, which is that the extent they can be said to “run” anything is open to debate. Universities are highly decentralized organizations dedicated to the free pursuit of knowledge. Almost all their cherished conventions—tenure, peer review, academic freedom—are designed to safeguard against central control. Within the university gates, presidents must contend with faculty associations, student unions, and boards of governors; beyond the gates they are buffeted by the whims of city, provincial and federal governments.

But the challenges of academic administration are eternal, as are the fiats of governments. The bigger, institutional challenges facing Canada’s big five universities could perhaps be divided under two big topic headings.

First, they are hobbled by one-size-fits-all rules and mandates even as they have begun to try to compete, not against other Canadian universities, but against the best in the world.

Second, they have begun to realize that it matters little how well universities perform their role as incubators of new ideas if those ideas never take root in a broader, innovative society.

David Naylor, the deceptively soft-spoken medical researcher who has served as the University of Toronto’s president since 2005, has been a leading spokesman on both sets of issues. In a December 2006 speech to the Women’s Canadian Club of Toronto, he called for Canada to unabashedly seek to have some of the world’s greatest universities. And since they can’t all meet that goal, Naylor said our generic distribution of roles and resources has to end.

To catch up to the U.S., universities will need more government funding

The Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada will put out an updated report this autumn called “Momentum,” about all the progress Canadian university research is making. But this week, while I was chasing Maxime Bernier all over Southern Quebec, they put out a report showing that “momentum” might not be the best word to describe the total funding picture for Canadian universities. Two of my colleagues reported on the, er, report when it came out, and their stories captured the essential point: that total funding per university student in Canada is thousands of dollars less today than it was 20 years ago, thanks largely to rampant increases in enrolment. The result is a substantial gap between per-student funding in Canada and in the United States. It’s the next major challenge in our post-secondary education system and I’m going to spend a fair bit of time on the report’s findings, complete with fancy charts and graphs, after the jump.

First, the general situation: total funding per student in public four-year universities in the U.S. has grown fairly steadily, while it has stagnated after steep decline in Canada:

This means that in the U.S., the ratio of profs to students is roughly the same as it was 20 years ago. In Canada, and to some extent in the UK and to a dramatic extent in Australia, enrolment growth has far outstripped faculty growth:

Now, it’s not as though governments have been ignoring universities. Thanks largely but not entirely to the Canada Foundation for Innovation, there’s been a capital revolution on campuses since federal deficits were elminated in the late 1990s:

In all those shiny new buildings with shiny new labs, there’s a lot more research going on. Federal research funding has more than doubled since the late 1990s, although growth has started to flatten out. Provincial and private-sector funding has grown, though not quite as rapidly:

But here’s where the blessing starts to look a little like a burden. Massive new research capacity has become a draw on other university activities: the labs are so costly to run that other budgets — for teaching and other quality-of-student-experience matters — are squeezed:

Which brings us to where we started. Partly due to the new (immensely valuable, but still budget-hungry) research capability on campuses, and partly due to exploding enrolment, funding per student is declining:

There. That’s a 70-page study in a few minutes. What’s to be done? There will always be readers who argue that many tens of thousands of students are going to university who shouldn’t: that they’d be better off in community colleges or skilled trades. Fine, but by now it’s going to take an ambitious program to dissuade all the students who’ve decided they can’t do without a university education. If they’re going to go, it would be good if their education could be well funded. There are a few options here. One is to permit those students who can afford it to bring their own money (or, yes, their parents’), in the form of increased tuition fees (partly compensated, for less affluent students, by substantially improved student aid.) But that’s not the whole answer. Nor is philanthropy, although every bequest helps. Governments are simply going to have to chip in.

Why Neil Turok wasn’t at the announcement of his own appointment

Incidentally, here’s why Neil Turok couldn’t be in Waterloo for the Perimeter Institute announcement on Friday. He is hosting a valued colleague at his other institute on the other side of the world. He is a busy fellow.

Click here to read Maclean’s senior columnist Paul Wells’ blog “Inkless Wells.” 

The idea behind Turok’s African Institute for Mathematical Sciences is similar (though there is no institutional link that I can find) to the idea for the African Institute of Science and Technology, which will open in Abuja this autumn and then expand into a network of science and engineering schools in several African countries: growth and development are best served when some of a society’s members are allowed, indeed pushed, to test themselves against the best in the world. (True and important to remember in Canada, incidentally, but more urgently needed in Africa.) There’s an obvious model: The Indian Institutes of Technology, whose establishment in the 1950s had a lot to do with India’s current (spotty, incomplete) rampant technological and economic growth.

With the new blog software, incidentally, we get to see how much interest each post gets from readers. (Must…not… obsess.. over… traffic…stats…) It’s gratifying to see that yesterday’s post on the announcement of Turok’s appointment was one of the most popular postings we’ve had here. It’s almost as though people were interested in interesting things.

As a bonus, part of the Total Foundational Physics Geek-Out here at Inkless, here’s a good look at Montreal architects Saucier + Perrotte’s design for the Perimeter building just off Erb St. in Waterloo. (I like how I say “Just off Erb St.” as though I knew Waterloo like the back of my hand. Just don’t ask me where Erb St. is.) During my one brief conversation with Gilles Saucier, I told him the Perimeter building and the new music building at McGill University both feel a little bit like slabs of slate or something extruding from the earth, and they put me in mind of some of Edward Burtynsky’s photography. Saucier was surprised and pleased. He has had many chats with Burtynsky, he said, about materials and landscapes.

There’s so much money sloshing around here that it is not easy to see clearly

The mystery deepens. In my last post I pointed out that, if the Brits are cutting Commonwealth Scholarships for Canadians, Canada can hardly complain, having cut Commonwealth Scholarships for Brits in 2006. But then the ball takes an interesting bounce, and I’d be grateful for the help of you Inkless Irregulars — especially the access-to-education division, Rob and Alex and others — in helping me follow where it landed.

Recall (or just read the post below) that the feds cut some hefty sum from international-level scholarships in 2006. John Baird’s reasoning, if I may use that term, was that scholarships are a provincial responsibility.

To read comments on this post and add to the discussion CLICK HERE for the original post

Now. Flash forward to March of this year, when Jim Flaherty’s budget, written off by all observers as boring (my rebuttal: there is no boring way to spend $200 billion), included substantial allocations for scholarships. As I noted, the money essentially amounted to a decision to perpetuate Jean Chrétien’s Millennium Scholarship Foundation, which was designed to run down in a decade, although Flaherty rings important variations on the program design, so it’s all a bit apples and oranges.

But note the Vanier Scholarships. Five hundred a year, high-value prizes, available to both Canadians who want to study abroad and foreginers who want to study in Canada. As our Erin Millar pointed out at the time, the budget for the Vanier thingies is $25 million over two years.

There’s so much money sloshing around here that it’s not easy to see clearly. On the face of it, it looks to me like the new investment more than compensates for the old cuts — that the Harper government is a late-blooming but, finally, fairly generous convert to the idea that there’s a federal role in rewarding merit, building Canadian brains and wooing smart foreigners.

I’d be grateful for smart, informed confirmation or rebuttal of that impression. Use the comments or send me an email. Thanks.

Maclean’s columnist Paul Wells on changes to student aid in Canada

From Alex Usher at the indispensable Educational Policy Institute, a grown-up assessment of the student-aid provisions in yesterday’s federal budget. Alex demonstrates real design flaws that should be fixed before the Canada Student Grants are implemented. But a few things are clearer today than they were last night.

Read Paul Wells’ blog “Inkless Wells” for more commentary

• Jean Chrétien’s Year 2000 bauble, the Canada Millennium Scholarships — designed to last a decade and scheduled to run out next year — will not leave a vacuum behind when they disappear. Despite major design flaws, the Millennium Scholarships were appreciated by student groups who worried mightily about their disappearance. (OK, try not to notice that only 621 people signed the CASA petition. Work with me here a bit.) And in retrospect, as millennium projects go — remember when everyone thought they needed a millennium project? Strange days — a massive investment in human capital did make a lot more sense than, say, a dome.

• Unlike the Chrétien-Martin formula of a one-time allocation to a “foundation” that is designed to be spent down to zero — and to produce a funding crisis in its last year — the Canada Student Grants are part of regular annual program spending. This means they are permanent, at least insofar as, like any other program, the only way to get rid of them is to shut down the budget line, which will get noticed if it ever happens. And the total amount in the grant program is budgeted, in the first few years, to increase every year, not to hold at a steady-state of about $350 million.

• The new grants reach massively more students than the Millennium Scholarships did, though they do it by giving each recipient less money. Whether you like that will depend on whether you would have qualified for one of the old awards. But the new grants also distribute the money in a different, smarter way: the CSG bursaries will be paid up-front, to keep students from incurring debt at the outset. Millennium scholarship money was typically paid after a student completed her studies, to help pay down debt that had already been incurred.

• The Millennium Scholarships suffered from more than a year of confusion at the outset because nobody could decide whether they were need- or merit-based. Chrétien wanted a substantial merit component. That eventually got sorted out, but the Tories avoid this confusion by launching two discrete programs: the CSG (income-based, which as Usher points out is different from need-based and, if your income is low, better) and the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarships (scroll down, it’s in here somewhere). At first glance, these looked trivial to me — only 500 a year. But on a population basis, that makes the program comparable in size to the U.S. Fulbright program, and way bigger than the Trudeau Scholars program, which funds about 15 recipients per year. And those comparisons seem apt: the “merit” being rewarded here appears to be top-in-the-world merit, not garden-variety, you-win-if-you-get-an-A merit. Because the Vanier scholarships are international — foreigners can win them to study in Canada, Canadians can win them to help study abroad — they can, over time, constitute a powerful signal that Canadian universities aspire not only to house large student cohorts but, here and there at least, to encourage and welcome genius.

ON-THE-OTHER-HAND UPDATE: It looks like all the new money for the research granting councils is targeted toward specific fields of research. This is silly, and reflects the Harper government’s deep-seated conviction that surprise and individual initiative — whether it comes from the Tory back bench, the press gallery, or a laboratory somewhere — are bad news.

STRATEGY UPDATE: Still, wounded Liberals who don’t like being called chicken may ask, if on balance the budget does good things then why should the Liberals bring the government down?
Short answer: Because since when do Liberals want to be in the business of letting Conservative governments introduce useful budgets? If the opposition were working in its own interests, instead of second-guessing itself into a tailspin, it would already have defeated the Harper government before budget day.