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Author: Alex Usher

The Bailiffs Are at the Door

Just a short one today, because I am spending my Sunday on a flight to Almaty and have less time than usual to blog. Last month, I wrote “The Bill is Coming Due”.  It largely revolved around the theme that Canadian PSE institutions were too dependent on international students and that relatively minor failures in recruitment were now causing institutions real harm.  Also last month, I wrote about Ontario colleges and how they were killing the Golden Goose of international

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June 5, 2023 5 Comments

University Governance in Canada: Navigating Complexity

As the title of this podcast implies, this show is meant to cover as broad a swathe of higher education across the Globe. To make room for all that, we mostly stay away from Canadian topics (you get enough of that on the blog anyway). But today we’re going to change things up a bit in order to talk about one of my favorite books of 2022. Last fall, a quartet of Canadian higher education scholars – Julia Eastman, Olivier

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June 1, 2023 2 Comments

Economies of Scale and the Unmanageability of Universities

I’ve recently had reason to ponder some of the mysteries of university management.  I’ve concluded that it’s much harder to run a university in a moderately efficient fashion than it is to run pretty much any other type of organization.  And I say this not because of the multiple veto- (or at least go-slow) points that get set up through the process of academic governance, but rather simply because disciplinary structures stand in the way of most useful economies of

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May 31, 2023 4 Comments

Progress Studies and Data Collection in Higher Education

One of the things that absolutely cheeses me off about the field of higher education as a field is how little attention is paid to what might be called “progress studies”.  What are “progress studies” you ask?  Well, let me turn things over to Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowan, who coined the phrase in an Atlantic article a few years ago. “Progress itself is understudied. By “progress,” we mean the combination of economic, technological, scientific, cultural, and organizational advancement that

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May 30, 2023 2 Comments

Quid Pro Quo

The last federal budget was, as I noted at the time, a freaking disaster for post-secondary education, and a vivid warning to Government Relations that the arguments that the system – well, universities anyway – had hitherto relied upon were simply not working anymore and that a re-think was required.  Judging by the twitter convos I keep an eye on, I think this lesson is starting to penetrate, in the sense that people are recognizing that simply pointing at Israel

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May 29, 2023 3 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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