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Category: Canada

The Growing Importance of Fee Income

I made a little remark last week to the effect that on present trends, student fees would pass provincial funding as a source of revenue for universities by 2020-2021 and combined fed-prov government funding by 2025.  Based on my twitter feed, that seems to have got people quite excited.  But I should have been a little clearer about what I was saying. First of all, by “on present trends”, I literally meant do the simple/stupid thing and take the annual change from

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September 11, 2017 1 Comment

Welcome Back

Morning all.  Hope you had a good summer.  To welcome you back, let’s take a quick look at state of play in the sector as we start the academic year. In Canadian PSE, I don’t think there’s a whole lot of doubt about where things are headed this year.  Post-Naylor, we’re going to be talking research, research, research.  If you doubt this, take a look at Universities Canada’s recent budget submission.   As always, there are three “asks”; for the first time

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August 28, 2017 No Comments

Who Should Benefit from Skills Training Money?

We seem to be in a period in Canada where money for “skills” is in vogue, mainly because it is seen as a panacea for lots of quite separate problems. At a really high-order level, you’ve got the Innovation ministry in Ottawa pounding the drum on skills because the tech industry says skills are a bottleneck to whatever kind of tech-powered Nirvana the Minister imagines Canada to be headed towards. And then you’ve got the Employment and Social Development Ministry

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June 13, 2017 2 Comments

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
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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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