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Category: Governance

Those Big, Bad, “American-style” Program Reviews

Hi everyone, and welcome back. The best education story of the winter break was almost certainly the Globe piece on program reviews at Canadian universities.  Despite an inane headline (when it comes to a policy’s unsuitability, nothing unites Canadian bien-pensants more than claims to an American origin), it’s an important piece about a useful process occurring at universities across Canada. HESA has directly contributed to two of these exercises (you can see some of our work, here), and with that experience I think

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January 7, 2013 No Comments

Credit Transfer Agreements

Minor buzz earlier this week about a credit-transfer agreement between seven universities in Ontario. According to the press release, Queen’s, McMaster, Western and the Universities of Toronto, Ottawa, Waterloo and Guelph have agreed to full recognition of each others’ first-year university credit. While credit mobility generally is a Good Thing, this specific announcement puzzled me a bit. How is this actually new? Back in 1995, the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada introduced the “Pan-Canadian protocol on the Transferability of University Credits,” which

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September 28, 2012 No Comments

Good Governance and Student Unions

Some interesting news from New Zealand recently, where a bill on Voluntary Student Unionism recently became law. Basically, what this means is that student unions there won’t be able to collect automatic membership dues, the way ours do – rather, they’ll need to raise their money directly through voluntary contributions from students. This isn’t unprecedented – Australia’s Liberal government did the same thing in 2005, and the results weren’t pretty. Why hasn’t such an idea come to Canada? I’ve been

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April 23, 2012 3 Comments

Many Bolognas

I spent part of October in Bucharest at the Bologna Future of Higher Education conference, trying, as I always do at these things, to get my head around what is happening in European higher education. Part of the problem of trying to follow the Bologna Process is that there are many Bolognas that exist side by side. There is the “formal” Bologna – which is actually a crashing bore, unless you’re really into diploma supplements and qualifications frameworks and quality

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November 2, 2011 No Comments

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.

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