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Category: Governance

The Mediocrity of Canadian Quality Assurance

We have two more provinces looking at Performance-Based Funding (PBF): Manitoba and New Brunswick.  The former isn’t a huge surprise – it was something recommended by the Manitoba College Review (conducted in part by yours truly) and it was clear that if PBF was enacted, it would need to include colleges as well.  We can only hope that they follow the part of the recommendation which limited the performance funding to graduation outcomes, and not try to jam in every

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February 26, 2020 5 Comments

Time Horizons for Strategic Plans

One of the oddest conventions in strategic planning – in higher education, anyway – is that Strategic Plans should last for five years.  I know of no reason why five years is considered a standard length of measurement other than that when Stalin decided to resume planning in 1928 after the “pause” of the New Economic Policy and the defeat of his left-wing opponents Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev, he decided to do so in five-year increments.  After that, pretty much

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November 26, 2019 2 Comments

Strategic Planning for Ambiguous Organizations

I have been doing a fair bit of strategic planning work recently and one mantra that people like repeating when it comes this kind of exercise is “we’re not like a business, so we can’t plan like a business”.  I get why people say this, but they’re wrong.  Or rather, they’re right, but not for the reasons they think. When people say that “universities aren’t businesses”, mostly what they are thinking is that universities aren’t interested in profit, per se.  But

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November 25, 2019 2 Comments

The North American Higher Education Area

There was a fascinating little story last week about a contretemps at the American Association of Universities (AAU), where the executive committee made a controversial decision to expel McGill University and the University of Toronto, largely on the grounds of needing to spend more time focussed on “American issues”. I am sure this would have had an enormous effect on public opinion in Canada (wot, o my god, so nationalist, Trump/nativism gone mad, etc), if anyone in Canada had the

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October 18, 2019 1 Comment

Trudeau vs. Harper

As we move inexorably towards a fall election (21 October, in case you’d forgotten), it is time to try to evaluate how well the present government has done on skills, science and higher education and how its record stacks up against its main competitor, the Conservative Party.  We obviously can’t do a manifesto analysis now because the Conservatives don’t have a manifesto yet (though frankly, this recent set of policy speeches by Andrew Scheer are less than encouraging).  However, while

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June 4, 2019 8 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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