The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Funding and Finances

Are NSERC decisions “skewed” to bigger institutions?

That’s the conclusion reached by a group of professors from – wait for it – smaller Canadian universities, as published recently in PLOS One. I urge you to read the article, if only to understand how technically rigorous research without an ounce of common sense can make it through the peer-review process. Basically, what the paper does is rigorously prove that “both funding success and the amount awarded varied with the size of the applicant’s institution. Overall, funding success was

Read More »
June 8, 2016 4 Comments

Improving Higher Education in Africa Through Philanthropy

My reputation in Canadian higher education, for better or for worse, is that of being “the guy who knows what’s going on in other places”.  This credits me with a lot more knowledge than I actually have. But it does occasionally prompt people to ask me some interesting questions.  Recently, someone (hi, Krista!) asked me: so what would you say to someone who has a few million dollars to spend, and wanted to spend it on improving higher education for

Read More »
June 7, 2016 2 Comments

Early Results from the Tennessee “Free Tuition” Experiment

You may remember a blog I wrote last year concerning something called the Tennessee Promise.  Described by some as a “free tuition” program, essentially what it did was ensure that every Tennessee student enrolled in a Tennessee community college received student aid at least equal to tuition.  In the fall, the state touted that first year, direct-from high-school enrollments in Tennessee colleges had increased by fourteen percent.  But now, however, some more complete data is available in the form of

Read More »
June 1, 2016 2 Comments

Three Unconnected Thoughts on PSE and Aboriginal Peoples

1)      Changing Disciplines In the last five years or so, I’ve seen a real change in the way Aboriginal students are moving through the country’s PSE system.  For a whole number of reasons, aboriginal students were traditionally concentrated either in humanities disciplines like history and sociology, or they were in disciplines which led to careers in social services or direct band employment (child care, police foundations, education, nursing).  STEM and Business fields simply weren’t in the picture.  That’s changed substantially over

Read More »
May 27, 2016 3 Comments

How Rich are China’s Universities?

Last week, Mike Gow at the Daxue blog linked to some interesting data recently published by the Chinese government with respect to the budgets of the country’s top universities.  It only covers those institutions which report to the Ministry of Education (and therefore misses some important institutions like the University of Science and Technology of China (which reports to the Chinese Academy of Sciences) and the Harbin Institute of Technology (which reports to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology).  It

Read More »
May 17, 2016 No Comments
Load More

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.

Subscribe

Search Posts

Search Publications

Social Media

Linkedin Youtube Spotify

Recent Posts

More thoughts on...