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Category: Administration

Private Capital in Higher Education (Part I)

When you think about it, higher education is one of the greatest businesses in the world.  It’s a guaranteed and growing market – as economies develop, people want more of it.  And people are willing to pay tons of money for it.  Worldwide, total spending on PSE (public and private) is somewhere in the range of $1.5 trillion annually, at least a third of which comes in the form of tuition fees.  There has to be profit in there – and who

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June 18, 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

Pathways to Reform

There is a small sub-genre of higher education books that I call “University Procedurals.” The are microscopically detailed accounts detailing how institution X accomplished Y in mind-numbing committee-meeting-by-committee-meeting detail.  A good example of this genre is Mary Emison’s Degrees for a New Generation, which details the emergence of a new curriculum at the University of Melbourne in the mid-2000s, which I detailed back here.  Alexandra Logue, the former Provost of the City University of New York, has now written what may be

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February 1, 2019 1 Comment

Planning for a Recession

The United States is currently in its 113th month of consecutive economic expansion.  The all-time record is 120.  A trade-war-obsessed lunatic is in control of the White House, and earlier this year Congress approved maybe the most radical set of deficit-driven tax cuts ever proposed.  The likelihood that a recession hits the United States at some point in the next 24 months is thus exceedingly high. And when Americans sneeze, odds are strong Canada will catch a cold.  Which leads me

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October 2, 2018 No Comments

Management (or Lack Thereof)

[the_ad id=”12740″] There are steady complains about over-management or micro-management in universities.  And, sometimes, there’s a lot of truth to the complaints.  But I argue that in North America, there’s a pretty good case that universities are under-managed, and that an awful lot of the sector’s problems can be traced to under-management. When it comes to management, North American universities are quite different than, say, Australian and UK ones.  To over-generalize only a little bit, we only manage the institutions;

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June 21, 2018 4 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.

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