Some days, I go hunting for blog topics and what comes up are a bunch of ideas that might have made an entire post back in the days when this was a 450-word-per-post blog, but definitely don’t cut it in the 1100-word-per-post era. But they are still good topics! So today, I am throwing out a pair of unrelated thoughts for your consideration. Workloads A couple of weeks ago I mused about the causes of the current round of labour
By Alex Usher and Jonathan Williams In the global discussion about tuition fees and cost-sharing, the most common – and the most simplistic – way to divide up countries is into countries which are “free tuition” and those which are not. But it’s not actually anywhere near that simple. When it comes to student fees, national systems vary along four axes. First, the gross enrolment/participation rate; second the share of students attending public higher education institutions (worldwide, roughly a third
You may all have seen the recent University World News article about HESA’s big new publication, World Higher Education: Institutions, Students, and Funding (written by Jonathan Williams and myself), which is actually going live on March 31st. For the next few weeks, you’ll be getting some deep dives into the biggest stories that our data has thrown up. And today I want to talk about the biggest story of them all: the rise of the Global South. (Small methodological note:
Improving Boards of Governors Last week, I did a piece on academic Senates and how they could be improved. This got a few of you asking, “what about Boards of Governors”? Man of the People that I am, I have no choice but to accede. I should start with the usual caveats about Boards in Canada: not only do they come in a variety of sizes (most have between 15-30 members but there are some outliers), possess a variety of practices with respect
I thought I would follow-up on Monday’s discussion of Laurentian University’s Senate-busting escapades with another piece on what Senates could – and should – be. Because while I disagree strongly with what is being proposed there, I think there are some valid critiques to be made of how Senates function in many Canadian universities. Let me first acknowledge that Senate operations vary significantly, and while I am going to make some generalizations that I think are largely true, I am
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