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Category: Blogs

The Learning Centred University with Steven Mintz

Hi everyone, Tiffany and Sam here — your World of Higher Education podcast producers. While Alex is away in Japan, we’re here to introduce this week’s episode. In this interview, Alex speaks with Steven Mintz, a renowned scholar and postdoctoral researcher, and author of the book, “The Learning-Centered University: Making College a More Developmental, Transformational, and Equitable Experience” In the following conversation, Mintz discusses what makes a learning-centered university, the benefits of active learning over traditional lectures, and the practical

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March 27, 2025 No Comments

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

EDI and the Measurement of Merit

Across most of the world, the concept of academic merit tends to get operationalized as “best at passing a certain test taken by a limited group of people at a certain point in time.” A competition, in other words. For young people, it tends to involve passing an exam or set of exams, be they the American SAT, the Chinese gaokao, the Indian JEET, the French baccalauréat, etc. For aspiring professors, the competition is a little more subjective in the sense that

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March 25, 2025 2 Comments

Observations and Suggestions about Boards of Governors

 Today, a few random observations about University and College Boards of Governors, based on some thinking prompted by a class talk I gave at OISE last week and some noodling about Bill 12 in Nova Scotia. I have three thoughts and three propositions.  1) Boards of Governors Have Complicated Job Descriptions  Formally, the role of Boards is pretty clear. They choose institutional leadership, set (or at least approve) institutional priorities and—this one is the most important—they oversee institutional finances to make

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March 24, 2025 No Comments

The Fifteen, March 21, 2025

Welcome back for another edition of The Fifteen. For the past two weeks, it seems like there have only been two stories in higher education: the Trump attacks on higher education and the QS world subject rankings. We cover the first, of course, but also stories of growing pains, corruption, ambition and blatant rent-seeking from places as far afield as Korea, Italy, Brazil, Vietnam and China. Enjoy. The Trump administration is, understandably, a magnet for media attention that can make

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March 21, 2025 No 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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