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Category: One Thought to Start Your Day

Data Flourishing for Universities and Colleges (Management Edition)

Hi all. I’m writing jointly today with colleagues Andrew Drinkwater and Pat Lougheed from Plaid Analytics, a company with whom HESA is teaming up to offer services related to improving the state of data collection, analysis, and use on campuses across the country. We’re not going to spend time giving you an outline of what we’re offering (although do click here for more if this interests you), but we do want to talk about how we see data environments evolving

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May 27, 2025 No Comments

Strategy Horizons at the Top

I’ve been working on a project recently, looking at current university strategic plans around the world, and particularly those of leading “world-class” universities. One of the key things I am looking at is what you might call “strategic horizons”— how long do institutions see or plan ahead? My sample for this is the Top 100 universities from the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), done by the Shanghai Rankings organization (minus the MD Anderson Cancer Centre in Houston, which is

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May 26, 2025 1 Comment

The Cost Implications of AI in Postsecondary Education

I have been noodling for a while on the question of how the use of Artificial Intelligence is likely to change the cost structure of institutions, so I thought it was worth a blog. Particularly since most of the theories I hear about in this area are almost certainly wrong. The one thing I think we can confidently rule out about AI and teaching is that AI will “replace professors” (or in more extreme versions, “replace universities”). This is a

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May 21, 2025 1 Comment

Provincial Budgets 2025-26

Ok everyone, all the provincial budgets are in and so it’s time for our annual look at what another round of irresponsible pan-partisan political leadership has wrought for our sector for the next twelve months. Figure 1 shows the province-by-province breakdown of this year’s budgets, showing the change in transfers to institutions in real dollars over 1 year and 5 years for each of the ten provinces. In most provinces, collecting this data is pretty easy—you just look at the

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May 20, 2025 1 Comment

Two Ideas Long Overdue for Adoption

Two mini thoughts today rather than one long one. But they are both ideas which I think deserve to be taken more seriously than they currently are. Mergers that Make Sense You may recall that a few months ago, I skewered the idea that institutional mergers were a useful path to take for the purpose of cutting costs. But the more I have been thinking about it, there may be a pretty good case—at least in a few places—of mergers for

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May 14, 2025 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.

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