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Author: Alex Usher

Women in Engineering

Back around 1990, women signing up to be Engineers was a political statement.  Because of Polytechnique.  Because of the Fourteen.  It felt like a surge at the time, but maybe it was just Engineering-inclined students doing what they would have done anyway, only putting a political sheen on the choice.  Regardless, if you’d told anyone in the early 90s if enrolments in Engineering faculties would still be run running 4- or 5-to-1 male to female thirty years in the future,

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December 6, 2023 No Comments

Curves and Formulas

Time for a quick economics lesson. Every class in a post-secondary institution has a cost curve.  It looks something like this: Once an instructor is assigned to a class, that class has a set cost to the university regardless of how many students enroll, shown above as the Cost Curve (CC).  It’s mainly a function of the instructor’s salary and materials costs, which are very low in lecture courses, higher in laboratory courses, and highest in clinical courses.  That CC

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December 5, 2023 2 Comments

The Why and How of Holistic Admissions

A few universities in Canada are currently considering introducing holistic admissions.  But what does that mean, exactly?  And is it a good idea?  Making selections “holistically” is simply making decisions on things in addition to secondary school academic results.  In most of the world, this idea is pretty heretical.  Secondary school results (or matriculation exams such as China’s gaokao or the French baccalauréat) are the be-all and end-all where university admissions are concerned.  In these countries, there is a deep

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December 4, 2023 1 Comment

Post-Soviet Higher Education

In the immediate post-war period, the Soviet Union, despite the immense destruction that had been wreaked across its territory by the Nazi invasion of 1941-44, shocked the world with its rapid acquisition of what was then high technology, in particular with respect to the nuclear and space sectors. It also rose quickly ot have the world’s second largest university system, just behind the United States. Its prowess in education and Science provoked huge investments in higher education in science. But

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November 30, 2023 No Comments

Rankings Round-up (3): The Evolution of QS Rankings

Today, I will round out our rankings week by looking at the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) Rankings.  These rankings have always been similar to the THE World University Rankings, because they spring from the same source: QS was the organization that actually ran the THE rankings for a few years, and when THE decided to bring the data operation in-house, QS just kept producing its rankings.  Like THE, its indicators for university rankings used are mostly a mix of field-normalized bibliometrics

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November 29, 2023 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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