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One Thought to Start Your Day
One Thought To Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.
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Manitoba on Strike (Again)
To Winnipeg, where the University of Manitoba Faculty Association (UMFA) has gone on strike for the second time in five years. It probably won’t be the last institution to see labour action this year (see Ken Steele’s very good round-up of boiling-over labour issues here). The main issue is over
Same But Different (Part 2)
Yesterday, I outlined the key similarities between the US and Canadian higher education systems. Today, let’s talk differences. The most obvious dissimilarity is some of the institutional forms. Religious colleges are much thicker in the ground in the US, as are liberal arts colleges (neither is unknown in Canada, but
Same But Different (Part 1)
One of the challenges I find in doing comparative higher education work is that because everyone in the field went to university, they think they know what a university is. But the fact is universities around the world are different: they are run on different logics; they aspire to do
Affordability, 2021
StatsCan released its annual survey of tuition fees at universities last month (it does not bother to collect similar data with colleges, because reasons). Average domestic undergraduate fees looked like this: Figure 1: Average Undergraduate Tuition, by Province, 2021-22 Only two things to note here. First, Ontario fees keep falling
Water
Big day at HESA Towers as it’s the return of our Academic Programs Team’s series Monitoring Trends in Academic Programming (MTAP), a project led by Jonathan McQuarrie. This edition is about programs which focus on Water, and you can read it here. It’s also the first MTAP with a co-author, Tiffany
Smith Plus 30
Thirty years ago last week, the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (now Universities Canada) published a wholly remarkable document entitled The Report of the Commission of Inquiry on Canadian University Education (I can’t find an online edition but here’s a contemporary account from Maclean’s). Since the Commission was just one man – Stuart
Core Funding Versus The Hustle
If you’re a long-time reader, you’ll know I often produce diagrams of funding trends for Canadian universities that look like this: Figure 1: Total University Revenue by Source in Billions of $2019, Canada, 1979-80 to 2019-20 But I am starting to think this method of portraying the data does not
Don’t Mention the Monsters
Lawrence Freedman’s Strategy: A History is a useful (if lengthy) book if for whatever reason you are thinking about going into a strategic planning process. It traces the history of the concept of strategy through its initial application in the military, then through politics, and eventually – post World War II –
Higher Education Crucible: The Former Eastern Bloc
Today, I want to talk a little bit about a region of the world that doesn’t get a whole lot of attention/respect in higher education talk, but which has recently faced some quite unimaginable financial and demographic challenges. The higher education systems of the former Soviet Union and its erstwhile
Non-existent Preconditions for DARPA Success
The federal government is taking its sweet time being sworn in (apparently the GG is on holiday in Germany or something), so it’ll be another week or so before we get new ministers and new mandate letters. These letters set ministers’ priorities in a more formal way than manifesto commitments.
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