The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Author: Alex Usher

Focus

On Friday, Newfoundland’s Premier Andrew Furey ruffled some feathers at Memorial (now officially “the Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador”, so no more calling it MUN, please).   In trying to explain what he intended to do with respect to the “Big Reset’s” recommendation of a 30% cut in grants without actually saying anything of substance, he stated: Memorial University has to figure out what it wants to be when it grows up…It has amazing potential, and it too is at a crossroads, of

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May 17, 2021 1 Comment

Problems in Writing the History of Academia

All my historian readers seemed to enjoy last Thursday’s piece about writing campus histories, so I thought I would do a quick follow-up on things that drive me spare about the state of the art in writing about academia.  To my mind, there is a single serious problem, and it is this: institutional histories are everywhere, but they are almost all rooted in local and national histories whereas academia is global.  As a result, most institutional histories are limited when it comes to

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May 13, 2021 2 Comments

Jumping to Conclusions on Rankings

You may have seen stories in Inside Higher Ed and University World News about the QS World Rankings, and specifically, a claim by a Senior Researcher at Berkeley named Igor Chirikov that QS’s conflicts of interest “may produce significant distortions in global university rankings”.  Cue much clucking on the interwebs about issues with rankings. All I can say, having read the paper, and having some idea of what QS does, is that the word “may” is doing a fair bit of work in that

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May 12, 2021 3 Comments

Short Courses and Continuing Education

A few weeks ago, Statistics Canada released a paper profiling graduates of community colleges who already held bachelor’s degrees.  A significant number of these were graduates of foreign universities – immigrants who came to the country with a degree and then found they needed a Canadian credential.  But there were also a substantial number – fully 8% of all college graduates – who already had a degree from a Canadian university.  In the 1990s, when colleges first started pointing out this

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May 11, 2021 1 Comment

Newfoundland and Labrador’s Big Reset

Two Thursdays, two big reports out of St. John’s.  The first was a 355-page doorstopper on the post-secondary system; the second is the Report of the Premier’s Economy Team, snappily-titled The Big Reset, which broadly covers the province’s entire economy and government in a mere 342 pages.  I’m guessing this second report will have a bigger impact on the province’s post-secondary system, so it’s worth looking at what it says.  But first, a quick backgrounder on the province as a whole. Newfoundland

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May 10, 2021 1 Comment

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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