Category: Canada

Tenure and Promotion Criteria: You Get What You Ask For

Incentives matter. And all the major extrinsic incentives of university life can be found in documents known as “tenure and promotion criteria” (hereafter TPC). Every institution has a set of these (or indeed often multiple versions of them, since the criteria often vary from one faculty to another. Here’s McGill’s policy. Here is Waterloo’s. Here’s an extremely detailed one produced by the University of British Columbia. They are not exactly the same, but they rhyme. And what’s fascinating is what is not in any of them. Let’s start with research, or as

Read More »

Rays of Optimism, Paths Forward

Last Thursday and Friday, HESA held our Re: University conference in Ottawa. It achieved what we wanted it to achieve – to get people to have hard, tough conversations about what’s ahead and how to deal with the still-growing threat to Canadian universities. Today, I want to clue everyone in on a couple of highlights and meditate on a way forward. The opening session, with RBC’s John Stackhouse and two former Ontario premiers, Dalton McGuinty and Bob Rae, was in

Read More »

Application Frustration

It’s application season. Time used to be, I could give y’all some really good insight into application trends by using data from the Ontario University Application Centre as I did here, in 2018.  And here, in 2021. All thanks to a modicum of data transparency Until three years ago, OUAC was pretty good about providing data on applicants. It would tell you about applicant numbers, it would tell you about first-choice applications, and it would tell you about total applications.

Read More »

Transnational Strategy Now

The world of transnational education – that is, the provision of education in one country by universities based abroad – is getting very interesting these days. In particular, branch campuses have returned to the centre of the industry’s activities in a way they have not been for well over a decade. Canada’s post-secondary system – which has always been a laggard in this area – risks getting left even further behind, unless institutions up their game substantially in the next

Read More »

How Students Choose

It’s application season, so I thought I would put some thought together on the factors that drive applications. I hope you enjoy it. How and when do young people choose to go to post-secondary education? This is one of those questions that made sense thirty years ago, but now it’s just not all that interesting. Most students in high school know they are staying in school after grade 12. It’s not a decision, it’s just something they absorb from their

Read More »