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Author: Alex Usher

Budgets, Control, Incentives, Rankings

Hi everyone.  Just a quick one today, an incomplete follow-up to Tuesday’s blog on rankings. One of the points I made on Tuesday was that several universities – and specifically, nearly all of the Australian ones apart from ANU – have made enormous strides in the rankings over the past 20 years, and this had been done largely in the absence of any funding boost.  A few of you were quick to point out that in fact there has been

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January 27, 2023 No Comments

Three Takes on the Latest Ontario Universities Applications Data

The Ontario High School Application numbers dropped last week, and I thought it would be worth a quick tour of the data.  Two things first: First: I know folks from outside Ontario get cheesed off about the way I keep banging on about Ontario numbers, but here’s the thing: the rest of y’all don’t publish your data.  I cannot write about hidden data: sorry. Second: speaking of hidden data, the Ontario Universities Application Centre, for extremely flimsy reasons, has stopped

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January 26, 2023 No Comments

What 20 Years of Rankings Tells Us About Institutional Performance

It occurred to me the other day that the oldest set of international rankings – that is the Academic Rankings of World-class Universities (ARWU), also known as the Shanghai Rankings – have now gone through 20 iterations.  I’m not one who believes that year-to-year changes in rankings mean much (too much noise, not enough signal), but twenty years of data?  As an old colleague of mine once said, if a research result is strong enough, even a weak methodology will

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January 24, 2023 4 Comments

Indigenous Identity

The issue of identity – specifically, the identity of scholars claiming to be Indigenous – is one of increasing importance in Canadian universities.  The recent resignations of Mary-Ellen Turpel-Lafond and Carrie Bourassa from UBC and the University of Saskatchewan, respectively, have had an enormous impact on those campuses.  Every campus needs to pay very careful attention to what as gone on at these institutions and adjust their policies accordingly. With respect to the case of Mary-Ellen Turpel-Lafond, a legal scholar

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January 23, 2023 1 Comment

Emergency Benefit Puzzles

Last week, Statistics Canada published a fascinating little report on how much assistance Canadian students received from the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) and the Canada Emergency Student Benefit (CESB) during COVID.  The results are interesting but lack a bit of context, which I thought I would provide. It’s been nearly three years since CERB and CESB were a thing, so here’s a refresher:  CERB was announced on March 25 just a few days after much of the economy came

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January 20, 2023 No Comments

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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