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Category: Canada

Embrace and Contain

One of the reasons that Canadian universities have such an astonishing level of freedom from government oversight – particularly in Ontario – is that our university presidents have over the years achieved absolute mastery of the art of “embrace and contain.” Devotees of Yes, Minister, will know what I’m talking about. “Minister,” Sir Humphrey would say, “I am fully seized of your aims and will do my utmost to put them into practice.” This, of course, was code for saying that

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September 18, 2012 No Comments

77% Entitled

At HESA, we’re big on empirical evidence. We like it when people argue with data, rather than resort to the vacuous normative stuff that often passes for debate on issues like tuition fees. So, when I saw that the Association of Nova Scotia University Teachers (ANSUT) had published something on out-of-control executive compensation called A Culture of Entitlement which makes extensive use of data to “shed light on the steep increases in compensation for senior administrators since 2004,” I was naturally pleased.

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September 17, 2012 2 Comments

Airline Models?

Some of you may have seen Thomas Klassen’s piece in the Ottawa Citizen last week. It’s a nice short piece which succinctly lays out the “bricks vs. clicks” argument in higher education, and why the former is better than the latter. That said, I think his central premise – that universities are becoming more like airlines – is mostly wrong. Here’s his exact quote: The emerging business model of many universities is that pioneered by airlines. That is, a group of

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September 11, 2012 1 Comment

Motivation?

I was listening to an interview on American radio this the weekend with one of the leaders of CLASSE. The proceedings were sensible enough until the interviewee claimed that Quebec not only had the country’s lowest tuition fees, but also that it had the country’s highest levels of access. This is, simply, a lie. Quebec’s participation rates are inflated by its CEGEP system, which includes grade 12 – a which is offered in secondary school elsewhere in Canada. Then came

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September 5, 2012 1 Comment

Follies of the Rich and Philanthropic

One of the irritating things about modern capitalism is the way media and the establishment see the need to treat rich people’s ideas seriously, even if the subject at hand is something they know literally nothing about. Take, for instance, a recent story in Businessweek about Chamath Palihapitiya. A former Facebook insider, he’s now a venture capitalist with an eye for social entrepreneurship. The story has him creating a company called Brilliant, a “global online talent registry” that plans to identify

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August 27, 2012 No 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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