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Category: Academia

Private Capital in Higher Education (Part II)

To really understand universities, you need to understand their cost structure.  And to understand their cost structure, you need to understand that unlike businesses, they keep score not by profits but by prestige, and that prestige – to the extent it does not derive from events and successes in the long-ago past – is, to a considerable extent, driven by total expenditures.  Thus, to “succeed” institutions must spend as much as possible.  This leads to what is known as the

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June 19, 2019 No Comments

Hi From NAFSA

I love the annual conference of the National Association of Foreign Student Advisors (NAFSA), which is being held this week in Washington DC.  NAFSA, for uninitiated, is both a conference with lots of interesting presentations on international education (I was doing one on International Education Policies in the Americas, as part of the work I have done with colleagues Janet Ilieva, Vangelis Tsiligiris and Pat Killingley for the British Council—watch the blog next week).   But it is also a massive

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May 30, 2019 No Comments

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
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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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