The EdUp Canada Podcast

Henry "Hank" Herzing is 90 years old. He read the weekly reports this morning. He'll talk to Frank Cianciarusa, his president, again this week. And at some point in the not-too-distant future, he'll convene his entire Canadian and American team in Florida, because that's what you do when the culture you've built matters more to you than your title.

In this episode of the EdUp Canada Podcast, host Michael Sangster sits down with the founder and CEO of Herzing College's Canadian operations — nearly 50,000 students trained across Canada over the institution's history — for a conversation that is, at its heart, about what it means to run a business for the right reasons over a very long time.

Henry traces his career from a computer school in Milwaukee with 25 students and one grand dame receptionist, through eight years of losses in the trades division he refused to abandon, through a Navy missile incident that gave him his ethics framework before he'd ever hired his first instructor, all the way to a Winnipeg graduation where a mother grabbed him in a hug meant for her daughter — and a photo op where another mother quietly mentioned she'd graduated from Herzing 40 years earlier, gotten a job the next day, retired from that same employer, sent her daughter through university with the income, and watched that daughter come back to Herzing for skills.

That's not a marketing story. That's a life. And Henry Herzing has been accumulating them for six decades.

Diane Stone didn't plan to end up in insurance. She planned to be an accountant — spent years auditing school districts and career colleges with KPMG in Vancouver, then went in-house as CFO of a large private school for almost 15 years. Then she had what she calls her first midlife crisis, moved to Dubai as Director of Finance at the American School of Dubai, came back to Canada just before COVID, and found herself being asked by the broker she'd used for 20 years if she'd like to build a new specialty practice serving the Canadian education sector.

She said yes. And in doing so, she became one of the most well-positioned observers of career college risk in the country.

In episode 98 of the EdUp Canada Podcast — two episodes from the show's 100th milestone — host Michael Sangster sits with Diane for a wide-ranging conversation that opens, unscripted, with something she'd learned on a call that very morning: insurance companies are now building products to cover businesses against the errors they make from over-relying on AI. A British Columbia lawsuit — Tumblr Ridge, suing ChatGPT over advice it gave a school shooter — is the landmark case. And the sector is bracing for more.

The episode also covers the two insurance gaps Diane sees most consistently across career colleges, what Hub's Oceans 11 model of local specialist brokers looks like in practice, why the insurance industry may be one of the more AI-resilient sectors for people who are genuinely relational, and what Diane has learned about the career college sector — its agility, its regulation, and its willingness to meet gaps in the market — from the outside looking in.

Henry "Hank" Herzing is 90 years old. He read the weekly reports this morning. He'll talk to Frank Cianciarusa, his president, again this week. And at some point in the not-too-distant future, he'll convene his entire Canadian and American team in Florida, because that's what you do when the culture you've built matters more to you than your title.

In this episode of the EdUp Canada Podcast, host Michael Sangster sits down with the founder and CEO of Herzing College's Canadian operations — nearly 50,000 students trained across Canada over the institution's history — for a conversation that is, at its heart, about what it means to run a business for the right reasons over a very long time.

Henry traces his career from a computer school in Milwaukee with 25 students and one grand dame receptionist, through eight years of losses in the trades division he refused to abandon, through a Navy missile incident that gave him his ethics framework before he'd ever hired his first instructor, all the way to a Winnipeg graduation where a mother grabbed him in a hug meant for her daughter — and a photo op where another mother quietly mentioned she'd graduated from Herzing 40 years earlier, gotten a job the next day, retired from that same employer, sent her daughter through university with the income, and watched that daughter come back to Herzing for skills.

That's not a marketing story. That's a life. And Henry Herzing has been accumulating them for six decades.

James Matechuk went on Global News on Canada Day to talk about what Canada means to him. He spoke for 10 minutes — about international education, career colleges, the way students from every part of the world come together on Canadian campuses and empower each other. The segment used about five seconds of it.

In this episode of the EdUp Canada Podcast, he finally gets to make the case in full.

As Senior Director of Higher Education Partnerships for the Oxford International Digital Institute, James has spent years watching what happens when newcomer students arrive with the drive but not quite the English to immediately succeed — and what happens when the right support is there versus when it isn't. He's been on campuses in Newfoundland, seen the programs, sat with the students, and now he's working with NACC to bring a simple but powerful fix to career college members across the country: a six-week, fully online, flipped-classroom English pathways program with a 98% student success rate.

The conversation covers what James calls the "pathways paradox" — the regulatory catch-22 where colleges need English pathway programs to resource their intake, but can't offer those programs without students to fund them. It covers a co-developed English for Healthcare program with Keyin College in Newfoundland, including a customized Newfoundland dialect module. And it ends with a student story that begins with a decade of family bake sales in Brazil and ends with tears of joy in a Canadian classroom on the first day of school.