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Author: Alex Usher

Bring Back the Transparency Debate

In 1991, Maclean’s began publishing university rankings.  In doing so, it relied heavily on university co-operation: in particular, it required institutions to fill in a survey for various pieces of data on admissions, class sizes, etc.  Not all the questions were particularly well-defined and so there was a lot of data gaming.  Eventually, in 2006, the universities decided they were not going to play the game any more: they were going to get out of the rankings business and instead set up

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November 15, 2021 1 Comment

The University of Austin

So, some of you may have seen the kerfuffle about the creation of a new university “dedicated to the truth” (see the NYT article here).  This initiative, unconventionally announced to the world via a Medium blogpost, is to be led by the former President of St. John’s College (Annapolis) Pano Kanelos, but he has accumulated a very large number of backers, both in terms of finances and “people who matter”.  This latter group includes a wide variety of people, some of

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November 11, 2021 3 Comments

MOOCs at 10

In the fall of 2011, Sebastian Thrun, a computer science professor at Stanford, began teaching a class.  Part of it was in person.  Part of it was online.  The online portion had over 160,000 students.  Some of them did better than the students who took the class in person.  Out of this single data point, a legend was born. What grew up in the twelve or so months after this even was a sight to behold.  Thrun left Stanford to

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November 10, 2021 2 Comments

Experimental Evidence on Student Assistance

One of the things I am proudest of in my career is the role I played – almost 20 years ago when I was at the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation – in trying to start a tradition of evidence-based research in Canadian higher education.  And by evidence-based, I don’t just mean creating better statistical bases to describe systemic inputs and outputs, I mean actual experimental evidence regarding how certain treatments/policies work. For those of you not up on the concept

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November 9, 2021 2 Comments

Labour Scarcity and Higher Education

A few weeks ago, the economist Armine Yalnizyan penned a really good piece for The Star. It examined  epoch-defining shift in “developed” economies from a world in which labour is plentiful and capital is in short supply, to one in which capital is plentiful and the competition is for labour.  This will have profound effects on higher education, which I don’t think many in the sector have absorbed. The upshot is this: we are going into a period where labour

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November 8, 2021 2 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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