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Category: Administration

Check-in on Administrative Bloat, 2025 Edition

Check-in on Administrative Bloat, 2025 Edition It’s been a little over five years since I took a serious dive into the question of “administrative bloat,” which apparently exists everywhere but in the statistics. Still, always good to check assumptions every once in a while, and I thought five years was long enough to make a new look at the data worthwhile. So here goes: Let’s start by reviewing what we can and cannot know about staffing at Canadian universities. StatsCan

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March 26, 2025 2 Comments

How UK Universities are Different

I spent a couple of days in late February in the UK at a meeting of the Higher Education Strategic Planning Association (HESPA). I found it interesting, not just because of the sessions themselves but because I actually got to understand something pretty important about how UK universities work. And friends, they do not work the way they do over here in our neck of the woods. I had noted from the outset that there wasn’t really any organization like

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March 9, 2025 1 Comment

How Program Closure Decisions Get Made

A lot of institutions, in reaction to recent changes are going through program closure (or in politer terms “program suspensions” which in theory means they might get resurrected at some point be revived or saved, but don’t bet the house on it). So, it’s worth going through how these decisions tend to get made. Contrary to what you might hear, “low enrollment” technically is not the reason anyone closes a program: it’s a bit more complicated than that. The real

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March 3, 2025 3 Comments

The Meaning of 2025

So, was that a fun year, or what? From Marc “Tonya” Miller and the federal government knee-capping the postsecondary sector in January to Marc “Harding” Miller and the federal government coming back around in September to knee-cap the college sector specifically to Ontario college presidents calling each other whores and more…it was a year to remember. Heck of a ride. But as catastrophic as the current fall in revenue seems, it’s worth remembering a couple of things. First, we’re not

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December 11, 2024 3 Comments

Fall and Rise

Fall and Rise The question I am getting more often than any other these days is: “what are you hearing about cuts at colleges and universities?” And my answer for the most part has been: “damned if I know.” The reason for my confusion is that publicly available details are few and far between. The HESA Towers team has been scouring the public record for details on institutional budget announcements; by our count, only 34 universities or colleges have so

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December 10, 2024 1 Comment

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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