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Author: Alex Usher

Strategic Actors, Strategic Planning, Strategic Hiring

Why do universities keep writing strategic plans?  It sounds like a simple question, but it isn’t.  Every institution has a strategy, in the sense that it has a sense of “where it wants to go” and how to get there in a tolerably efficient manner.  These strategies aren’t always written down, but they exist nonetheless: that is to say (to get all Mintzberg for a minute) that strategy can be “realized” without being “intended”.   Writing a strategic plan is – in

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June 1, 2022 4 Comments

Ontario Provincial Election Manifestos 2022

Thursday is election day in Ontario and somehow, a Conservative government that spent the last two and a half years managing the pandemic with a clownish and occasionally malevolent incompetence seems poised to win another four years with a majority government.  Still: I do these manifesto reviews come hell or high water, so here we go. Let’s start with the fact that the NDP and Greens both agree that the Ford cuts to OSAP need to be reversed, all three

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May 31, 2022 No Comments

Ontario in a Nutshell

All righty then: so far in this nutshell series we’ve avoided writing about the two “big” provinces, but since Ontario is going to the polls this week, we thought it made sense to tackle that province today, before we get to the manifesto.  Let’s start with student numbers.  You need to remember that Ontario is big.  Where post-secondary numbers are concerned, it has an even bigger footprint than it does in terms of physical size or population.  43% of all university

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May 30, 2022 No Comments

America’s Student Debt Cancellation Morass

It has now been something on the order of 26 months since anyone in the United States has been required to make payments their student loans.  As in Canada, these payments were suspended at the outset of the pandemic.  But whereas in Canada repayments re-started after about six months (Oct 1, 2020), in the United States they have yet to do so.  Understanding why gets us all a little closer to understanding the disfunction that is the American Higher Education

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May 26, 2022 2 Comments

The Alberta Exodus

A few months ago I wrote a piece on inter-provincial mobility in Canada in which I a) noted that in absolute terms, Alberta was the country’s largest net-exporter of students and b) this was a big change from 15 years ago when it was one of the larger net-importers.  When I pointed this out, I had a number of people on Twitter make assumptions about the deterioration of prospects for young Albertans, particularly after the collapse of the oil industry/arrival

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May 25, 2022 3 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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