Education Commons^™

Dealing With Disruption, Rethinking Recovery: Policy Responses To The Covid-19 Pandemic In Higher Education, Amira El Masri, Emma Sabzalieva

Publications and Scholarship

This paper examines policy responses in higher education in the months of March and April 2020 during the rapid unfolding of the COVID-19 pandemic. The purpose is to map responses and compare levels of coordination between three actors—the Canadian federal government, the Ontario provincial government, and Ontario’s publicly funded colleges and universities—and to consider the policy implications of these initial responses for higher education’s future recovery from the pandemic. Conceptualizing COVID-19 as both a wicked problem and, in the Canadian context, a complex intergovernmental problem, the paper draws on over 200 data points from public announcements made by these three …