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Category: Academia

The Canadian Professoriate: The Long View

Recently, I noticed that Statistics Canada has data on the Canadian professoriate dating back to 1970-71.  I don’t know if this is a recent addition to the free data scheme or if it’s been there all along and I have never noticed it, but it’s certainly worth a peek. Figure 1 is the simple picture, just total numbers.  It’s a pretty simple story: long-term, Canadian higher education has expanded by about 460 full-time academics per year every year since 1970. 

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January 12, 2022 1 Comment

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

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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

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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

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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

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November 22, 2021 7 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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