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Category: Canada

The Nordstrom Philologist

People are always nattering on about skills for the new economy, but apart from some truly unhelpful ideas like “everyone should learn to code”, they are usually pretty vague on specifics about what that means.  But I think I have solved that. What the economy needs – or more accurately, what enterprises (private and public) need – is more Nordstrom Philologists. Let me explain. One of the main consequences of the management revolutions of the last couple of decades has

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June 12, 2017 2 Comments

Why we should – and shouldn’t – pay attention to World Rankings

The father of modern university rankings is James McKeen Cattell, a well-known early 20th-century psychologist, scientific editor (he ran the journals Science and Psychological Review) and eugenecist.  In 1903, he began publishing American Men of Science, a semi-regular rating of the country’s top scientists, as rated by university department chairs.  He then hit on the idea of counting how many of these scientists were graduates of the nation’s various universities.  Being a baseball enthusiast, it seemed completely natural to arrange these results top to

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June 9, 2017 2 Comments

That Andrew Scheer Free Speech Promise

That Andrew Scheer Free Speech Promise You may recall that a few weeks ago I profiled the higher education/science/youth proposals of the various Conservative Party leadership hopefuls.  You may also recall that the candidate who eventually won the context, Andrew Scheer, had one proposal that distinguished him from the rest of the pack, to wit: In addition, Scheer pledges that “public universities or colleges that do not foster a culture of free speech and inquiry on campus” will “not have support from

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June 8, 2017 2 Comments

National Patterns of Student Housing

The other day I published a graph on student housing in Canada and the United States that seemed to grab a lot of people’s attention.  It was this one: Figure 1: Student Living Arrangements, Canada vs. US People seemed kind of shocked by this and wondered what causes the differences.  So I thought I’d take a shot at answering this. (caveat: remember, this is data from a multi-campus survey and I genuinely have no idea how representative this is of the student

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June 7, 2017 3 Comments

Making “Applied” Research Great Again

One of the rallying calls of part of the scientific community over the past few years is how under the Harper government there was too much of a focus on “applied” research and not enough of a focus on “pure”/”basic”/”fundamental research.  This call is reaching a fever pitch following the publication of the Naylor Report (which, to its credit, did not get into a basic/applied debate and focussed instead on whether or not the research was “investigator-driven”, which is a

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June 6, 2017 6 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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