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Category: Academia

Listening to Young Graduates

Canadian universities struggle to convert young alumni into positive assets.  And the reasons for this are gatekeeping and territoriality. Prior to graduation, student contact data is in the hands of departments who, for the most part, report to the Provost/VP Academic (primarily Registrars and/or Institutional Research Offices).  While they are students, universities ask students a lot of questions.  They get surveyed so frequently that survey fatigue and response rates are a major issue. The thing is, though, that asking students

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November 7, 2023 2 Comments

Food: An Aristotelian Strategy

These days, everyone is wondering about how to create more of a feeling of community on campus.  This isn’t just about getting students comfortable within a campus community, which is key to improving completion rates and raising student satisfaction. In many places it’s also about finding ways to get through what a seemingly worsening set of relations between faculty members and administration, Boards and senates, etc.  So how to get more, shall we say, esprit de corps?  I say, read

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September 19, 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

Leave Me Alone

Recently, I was somewhat surprised to discover the sheer variety of definitions of the term “collegiality” that are found in major online dictionaries. Collins places collegiality as a method of governance “the sharing of authority among colleagues” or, according to Oxford, it is “a word used in a theological context to signify that a group of bishops constitute a body, not a group of individuals” (which applies to universities since the original ones were nearly all church-governed).  A second definition

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May 1, 2023 3 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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