The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Author: Alex Usher

“Eating the Future” in Action

Y’all probably remember me talking about how Canada is eating the future by spending tons of money on consumption but not enough on real investments that pay dividends down the line. Today, I want to show you a prime example of that, and this: spending on the elderly. In every budget there is a line-item called “Elderly benefits” which includes Old Age Security (the non-contributory pension everyone over 65 gets) and the Guaranteed income Supplement (the means-tested income boost for

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November 13, 2024 4 Comments

Errata

Hi all. This is a bit embarrassing, but I need to come clean about something. I made a graph about federal government research expenditures back on budget night and have reused it several times since to make a point about anemic federal spending. The problem is, I goofed. Here is the graph, supposedly depicting federal spending on the tri-councils and the Canada Foundation for Innovation in millions real (that is, inflation-adjusted) $2023 dollars, including the increases in funding out to 2028-29

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November 13, 2024 2 Comments

Two Advances in Research Rankings

Hi all. Just a quick one today, bringing you up to date with a couple of new and interesting developments in the field of research rankings. The first has to do with the sudden rise of “Open” bibliometric data. To date, all of the major research rankings have used data from one of the two major publishers: Elsevier or Clarivate (formerly known as Thompson Reuters). No surprise here: Elsevier’s Scopus and Clarivate’s Web of Science are the main collators of

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November 12, 2024 3 Comments

Global Rankings Update 2024

Global Rankings Update 2024 Morning all. There are so many international rankings to track from one year to another that it’s easy to go a little glassy-eyed. So now that the 2025 Times Higher World Rankings are out, I thought I would do a little round up. Let’s start with how Canadian institutions did on the “Big Three” research rankings: The Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), the Times Higher Education World University Rankings (THE), and the QS World

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November 11, 2024 2 Comments

The University Advisory Group: Reimagining New Zealand’s Higher Ed Future with Chris Whelan

We live in a time when governments seem to have few ideas about how to manage massified higher education systems. One playbook in this situation, often used in the UK and Australia, is to punt the question to a group of experts in hope that they might find some policies to make higher education more useful, productive, and, let’s face it, cheaper. Today we’re going to take you to Wellington, New Zealand, where the new government, led by the National

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November 7, 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.

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