The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Author: Alex Usher

Unrest and Reform: Bangladesh’s Youth Movement and Higher Education with Sharowat Shamin

In our terminally postmodern world, it’s easy to discount student political movements. It has after all been decades since they were a major political factor in most Western countries. To the extent that we’ve seen them provoke major disruptions in recent decades, it’s tended to be in the service of rather narrow and self interested issues like tuition fees, as in South Africa in 2015 and 2016 and Quebec in 2011 and 2012. And yet we do know that in

Read More »
November 21, 2024 1 Comment

Senate House Notes

I spent a wonderful couple of days in London last week at the Festival of Higher Education, put on by the excellent folks at WonkHE (go sign up for all their stuff right now, because they are great). It was a wonderful convening of a type that simply doesn’t happen in Canada: 600 university folks in one spot, just nerding out on a whole bunch of issues bedeviling the sector. And not just the usual suspects at the top of

Read More »
November 20, 2024 1 Comment

Strategy, Differentiation, and Culture

(This blog post is a version of a talk I gave at the University Vice-President’s Network meeting a couple of weeks ago at Western University.) A couple of weeks ago, I made the case for the importance of institutional differentiation as a form of—or prerequisite to—strategy. Basically: an institution with a distinctive mission has a direction, a North Star by which to guide institutional actions, which makes strategic policy a whole lot easier. Famously, though, management theorist Peter Drucker once

Read More »
November 19, 2024 1 Comment

A New Alberta Postsecondary Review

The week before last, the Alberta Minister of Advanced Education, Rajan Sawhney announced a funding review for Alberta post-secondary education. I saw a fair bit of snarky comment about this on social media which I thought was kind of unfair. (Note to followers: now that Bluesky actually has passed the minimum viable size to be a useful social media platform, you’ll mostly find me there rather than Twitter. My address is: @alexusherhesa.bsky.social). So, let’s break it down a bit. The

Read More »
November 18, 2024 1 Comment

The Lost Potential of Institutional Research: Insights from ‘Outsourcing Student Success’

Inside every higher education institution lies a secret cabal of people — gurus really — who know everything about the institution and how it works. They’re called institutional researchers. And yet, despite all this specialized knowledge, the field (it’s not really a profession) is not usually at the heart of university decision making. Why is that exactly?  Today, my guest is Joseph Wycoff. He’s the author of ‘Outsourcing Student Success, the History of Institutional Research, and the Future of Higher

Read More »
November 14, 2024 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.

Subscribe

Search Posts

Search Publications

Social Media

Linkedin Youtube Spotify

Recent Posts

More thoughts on...