Blog
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.
Search the blog
The Canadian Professoriate: The Long View
Recently, I noticed that Statistics Canada has data on the Canadian professoriate dating back to 1970-71. I don’t know if this is a recent addition to the free data scheme or if it’s been there all along and I have never noticed it, but it’s certainly worth a peek. Figure
Faculty Salary Data, 2020-21
We haven’t looked at faculty salaries in awhile, so let’s do that. Getting a handle on recent faculty salary data is easy: it’s the one thing that Statscan does both rapidly and well in the higher education field. It may take them 30 months to produce student enrolment data, and
Victory
Morning everyone. Ready for another term of being trampled by a goddamn virus? Me neither. Still. Onwards. Towards the middle of December, the Prime Minster’s Office released mandate letters for all cabinet ministers. Yes, a mere three months after voting day, a meager 18 weeks after Parliament was dissolved for
Goodbye 2021 Hello, 2022
Ok, a few last words before we all take off for Christmas. This blog is going on break and will return on January 10th. This was a hard year. In some ways harder than 2020 because Jumping Jesus on a Pogo Stick this pandemic just doesn’t end, and even if vaccines have
No Competition
Lately, I’ve been wondering whether we have reached some kind of dead-end in the history of universities. Specifically, whether because of a combination of increasing regulatory control, professional conformity and institutional mission creep, we have got to a point where it has actually become impossible to imagine alternatives to the
Smash the Calendar
The north side of Edmonton’s downtown is maybe the most amazing couple of square miles in Canadian post-secondary education. You’ve got Norquest College (15,000 students) on 102nd. There’s MacEwan University (another 15,000) between 104th and 105th, and then starting around 115th you’ve got the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT), which adds
Ignoring Naylor
Cast your mind back to 2017 – 2018, when, in theory, everybody agreed that Canada’s Fundamental Science Review – aka the Naylor Review – was a Good Thing That Must Be Implemented. And so we got the 2018 Budget, which dispensed billions of dollars, mostly back-ended, over six years and which was
Book of the Year
Normally, I end the year with a “Higher Education Book of the Year” recommendation. It’s not quite the end of the blogging year – that’ll be a week today – but a) I’m barely reading anymore because of how busy things are at HESA Towers (we’re hiring new management positions,
Funny Math in Alberta
Many of my Canadian readers will likely have read a piece that has been circulating on the internet from Kim Siever, a self-described leftist internet journalist from Lethbridge. The headline says it all: UCP Government to Cut Post-Secondary Spending by $1.5 Billion; That Number Rises to $3.5 Billion if you Factor
Measuring Quality as if Quality Mattered
Last week, a colleague on Twitter (Hi, Brendan!) asked – possibly rhetorically – whether it was possible to measure quality in higher education. I took the bait and thought I would formulate my response here. Not everyone agrees, but I think in almost every aspect of higher education, quality can
Subscribe
One Thought. Once a Day. Get clear, sharp perspectives on higher education sent straight to your inbox.
Categories
More thoughts on...
-
Academia
-
Access
-
Administration
-
Admissions
-
Apprenticeships, Skills & Trades
-
Artificial Intelligence
-
Budgets
-
Canada
-
Colleges and Polytechnics
-
Data
-
Funding and Finances
-
Governance
-
Government
-
Hello Goodbye
-
History Lesson
-
Humour
-
Indigenous PSE
-
Innovation
-
Institutions
-
Internationalization
-
Media
-
Now Reading
-
Podcast
-
Policy
-
Politics
-
PSE Outcomes
-
Rankings
-
Research
-
Retrenchment Watch
-
Student Aid
-
Students
-
The Fifteen
-
Tuition
-
Universities
-
Worldwide PSE
Enjoy reading?
Subscribe and have Alex Usher’s One Thought to Start Your Day blog sent straight to your email.