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Category: Academia

Closing Programs

You may, over the past year, followed the story of Stevens Point, a mid-sized (8000 student) regional campus in the University of Wisconsin system.  I want to look at this story today, because I think it contains some important lessons about how universities actually make and spend their money. Back in March 2018 the college, facing falling enrolment, announced it was going to kill thirteen humanities and social sciences programs – American studies, art (excluding graphic design), English (excluding English

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May 29, 2019 1 Comment

Does My Institution Need a Strategic Plan?

As our company’s name suggests, we think a lot about strategic planning here at HESA Towers.  And after a decade of doing this job, I have come to the conclusion that while most institutions do not spend enough time planning, too many of those that do issue plans are under the mistaken that these plans are in any way strategic.  Let’s start with the first half of that sentence: there is not enough planning in Canadian institutions.  Remember, planning is

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May 27, 2019 No Comments

Age 71

Ontario is a weird place sometimes.  One month ago, the government announced that it was implementing a performance-based funding plan which – if you took the government’s half-thought-out comments seriously – raised the possibility that hundreds of millions or perhaps even billions of dollars currently projected to be spent on institutions might be snatched away if institutions failed to hit some ill-defined targets in a type of contract-based funding system.  You’d think this would be a big deal, something people

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May 23, 2019 5 Comments

If Canada Were Serious About Higher Education (coda)

Before reality intruded with a bunch of interesting stories from Ontario and New Brunswick, I was talking about the ways Canadian higher education is achieving less than it could: how the practice of our federal system condemns us to incoherence, how provincial governments are insufficiently focussed on results and how institutions don’t take internal quality assurance or improvement seriously. But what to do about it? First, we need to diagnose the problem correctly.  Clearly, this is not a problem with a single source: pretty much

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April 18, 2019 1 Comment

If Canada Were Serious About Higher Education (Part 3)

Yesterday, we considered how provincial governments could get serious about higher education.  Today, I want to start talking about institutions can get serious about their most important function: teaching. When it comes to provincial goal setting and making institutions accountable, measurement is the key to improvement.  I am not convinced this is entirely the case with teaching, because frankly no one knows how to measure it holistically.  There are things that can be learned by having students write tests like

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April 10, 2019 No 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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