The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Academia

Smash the Calendar

The north side of Edmonton’s downtown is maybe the most amazing couple of square miles in Canadian post-secondary education.  You’ve got Norquest College (15,000 students) on 102nd.  There’s MacEwan University (another 15,000) between 104th and 105th, and then starting around 115th you’ve got the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT), which adds another 20,000 students or so.  That’s a lot of teaching and learning. So why isn’t it better known?  I’d say the concentration doesn’t get the love/notice it should because there

Read More »
December 7, 2021 5 Comments

Measuring Quality as if Quality Mattered

Last week, a colleague on Twitter (Hi, Brendan!) asked – possibly rhetorically – whether it was possible to measure quality in higher education.  I took the bait and thought I would formulate my response here. Not everyone agrees, but I think in almost every aspect of higher education, quality can be evaluated.  Not always in strictly quantitative ways, but certainly in ways that allow general comparison across similar units or organizations.  But the important thing is that quality needs to

Read More »
November 30, 2021 3 Comments

The Impact of Impact

Over the past 24-36 months, we’ve seen a real shift towards talking about universities in terms of community benefit/impact rather than in terms of their scientific output.  No more valorization based on silly bibliometrics!  Valorization rather on….well, what exactly? The thing about the whole publish-or-perish thing is that it had created some reasonably fair and equitable standards.  These standards varied from place-to-place, and in some places, they went overboard in being overly-rigid on pure publication metrics, but basically people were

Read More »
November 23, 2021 3 Comments

UBC Expanding

A couple of weeks ago, the University of British Columbia issued a press release, which read: The University of British Columbia is expanding its presence south of the Fraser River with the $70-million purchase of a property in Surrey. Whoo!  Big bucks!  Can’t go wrong buying property in the Lower Mainland, right?  Seems like this could just be a good long-term financial play. I mean, why tie up your investments entirely in equities when property is so hot?          UBC

Read More »
November 22, 2021 7 Comments

The University of Austin

So, some of you may have seen the kerfuffle about the creation of a new university “dedicated to the truth” (see the NYT article here).  This initiative, unconventionally announced to the world via a Medium blogpost, is to be led by the former President of St. John’s College (Annapolis) Pano Kanelos, but he has accumulated a very large number of backers, both in terms of finances and “people who matter”.  This latter group includes a wide variety of people, some of

Read More »
November 11, 2021 3 Comments

One Thought to Start Your Day

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.

Subscribe

Search Posts

Search Publications

Social Media

Linkedin Youtube Spotify

Recent Posts

More thoughts on...