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Category: Academia

If Canada Were Serious About Higher Education (Part 2)

If you missed yesterday’s blog, we’re spending the week talking about how to improve higher education in Canada by acting less complacently.  Now you’re up to speed. Onwards! Let’s start our discussion of higher education improvement at the top of the food chain: provincial governments (if, for some reason, you think the top of the food chain is the federal government, feel free to spend some time perusing the blog archives). Governments fund universities and colleges.  Apart from Ontario, they

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April 9, 2019 3 Comments

If Canada Were Serious About Higher Education (Part 1)

Canada is a vast and largely self-satisfied land.  And when it comes to higher education, we do pretty well.  Depending on the measure of access one chooses, we’re either above average or top of the pack.  We have the biggest and best-funded college system in the world, one which is highly regarded for its innovativeness.  On research, we punch at or above our weight.  Our faculty – the full-time ones, anyway – are the best-paid of any in the world

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April 8, 2019 3 Comments

It’s Quiet Out There…Too Quiet

Whatever happened to good old-fashioned fads?  Great big, often stupid, enthusiasms about things that were going to change higher education completely.  Seems like we don’t hear about them anymore. Remember MOOCs?  They were going create tsunamis of change.  Many people said a lot of incredulous things about MOOCS and higher education, maybe none more so than Trent University’s Chancellor, Don Tapscott.  (Remember this gem of futurology, about the week “higher education as we know it “ended”?  Maybe not as bad

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April 1, 2019 1 Comment

The Academic Oligarchy’s Kryptonite

Following up on yesterday’s discussion on the long-term rise of administration: it occurred to me after hitting send that there’s another aspect to the rise of administration I forgot to mention – budgeting.  Historically, administration has to some degree grown as a function of the complexity of budgeting, for some very good reasons. A hundred years ago, budgeting in higher education was a fairly simple affair because universities didn’t actually do much (by today’s standards, anyway).  A small number of

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March 28, 2019 2 Comments

Governance, Management and Balancing Acts

Higher education is a hard thing to generalize about. Superficially, universities look the same the world over, but scratch beneath the surface a little and you’ll see that there are enormous differences in structures, policies, and cultures. Nevertheless, it’s still pretty safe to say that over the last 40 years (in some countries longer) three major trends have emerged more or less the world over:  first, in every country, there has been pressure to expand systems and accommodate greater participation in

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March 27, 2019 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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