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Category: Administration

Tracing Laurentian’s Path Part 2: External Shocks

Tracing Laurentian’s Path Part 2: External Shocks Broadly speaking, four external shocks contributed to Laurentian’s downfall.   First, the Barrie Campus and the costs associated with that experiment; second, the loss of 140 Saudi students in the summer of 2018 following the Canada-Saudi Twitter spat; third, the province’s decision to cut tuition by 10% in early 2019; and fourth, COVID.  I’ll add a fifth which was technically not a financial shock but certainly a waste of money.  Let’s go through each

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January 18, 2022 1 Comment

Tracing Laurentian’s Path Part 1 : The Building Spree

Morning all.  It’s been just over a year since the Laurentian University President and Board of Governors made the decision to declare insolvency.  Largely because of the institution’s decision to maintain radio silence with its own community and with journalists it doesn’t feel it can handle, there are major aspects to this story where we still do not have a complete picture of what happened, either in the long term (how did Laurentian get into this pickle) or the short-term

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January 17, 2022 11 Comments

Core Funding Versus The Hustle

If you’re a long-time reader, you’ll know I often produce diagrams of funding trends for Canadian universities that look like this: Figure 1: Total University Revenue by Source in Billions of $2019, Canada, 1979-80 to 2019-20 But I am starting to think this method of portraying the data does not actually explain what is going on in universities these days.  Instead, I think there are really only two categories of funding that matter: those that involve getting paid for traditional

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October 26, 2021 3 Comments

Don’t Mention the Monsters

Lawrence Freedman’s Strategy: A History is a useful (if lengthy) book if for whatever reason you are thinking about going into a strategic planning process.  It traces the history of the concept of strategy through its initial application in the military, then through politics, and eventually – post World War II – into the world of business.  Along the way it continually asks the question “what is strategy, anyway”, before eventually landing on a definition which is basically around leveraging strengths to

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October 25, 2021 2 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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