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Category: Academia

Laurentian Blues (1)

Laurentian University will run out of cash at the end of February.  That’s the most important – but far from only – take-away of the Monitor’s Report filed Monday in an Ontario court as Laurentian University filed for creditor protection. People are throwing around words like “unprecedented” to describe what is happening at Laurentian.  I’m always careful about that because before WWII a lot of wild things happened in Canadian universities (the Honorary Bursar making off with the entire University

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February 3, 2021 18 Comments

Failing to Look Outward

A few years ago, whilst working in an Eastern European country which shall remain nameless, I went to visit the school’s premier school of agriculture to ask them some questions about how their graduates were faring in the labour market.  “Well,” they told me, “we take this very seriously.  We do a lot of surveys of graduates and employers.” “Really,” I said.  “And what do these surveys tell you?” “They were very disappointing,” came the reply.  “It turns out that

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February 1, 2021 3 Comments

Two Short Notes About China

Hi all.  Short blogs for the next couple of days because HESA Towers is hopping and I’m really up against it for time. So just a couple of bite-size pieces today. Tsinghua in Trouble Once upon a time, if you wanted to point to how universities in China were driving economic growth, you’d point to Tsinghua University and specifically Tsinghua Holdings, which was a conglomerate made up of all the spin-off businesses which came out of “China’s MIT.”  Tsinghua Holdings is simply massive

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January 26, 2021 No Comments

Centralization and De-centralization in Campus Services

One of the constant tensions in University and College management is working out which services need to be delivered centrally and which can be decentralized and, if the latter, how they can be provided in a way which has at least some semblance of coherence. The deal is this: generally it’s cheaper to provide most services centrally.  Doesn’t really matter what kinds of services: administrative, research, teaching and learning, internationalization, etc.  Economies of scale exist, partially because you get fewer

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January 13, 2021 2 Comments
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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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