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Category: Innovation

The Follies of Technological Determinism

One of the most enraging things about people doing drive-by takes on higher education is their insistence on focussing on the “implications of technology” rather than looking at consumer demand.  This month’s example comes to us from the Research Department of the Royal Bank of Canada and their piece entitled The Future of Post-Secondary Education: On Campus, Online and In Demand. The piece is a little uneven, in the sense that it mixes grand pronouncements about the future of higher education

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June 11, 2020 No Comments

Brookings Improves on Superclusters

A few weeks ago, the Brookings Institution – America’s oldest and possibly most influential think-tank – published a paper called The Case for Growth Centers: How to Spread Tech Innovation Across America.  The paper’s problematique is the narrow distribution of tech growth in the United States (my favourite factoid here is that 90% of the growth in the country’s 13 highest-tech industries occurred in just five metro areas: Boston, San Francisco, San Jose, San Diego and Seattle) and that for the good of

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January 30, 2020 No Comments

Where Are All the Job-Killing Robots?

It’s Davos time, when we get to find out what the world’s power elite would like everyone else to freak out about for the next twelve months.  What is happening this year?  The theme is “stakeholders for a cohesive and sustainable world”, and while my impression is that the emphasis will be on the latter (Greta Thunberg has already had a powerful headliner), I think cohesion will still get some attention.  And where cohesion is concerned, they’re going to be

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January 22, 2020 1 Comment

Polish Higher Education Reforms

I was briefly in Warsaw last week talking about university rankings and how to improve overall institutional performance.  Poland is one of the most interesting higher education systems in the world right now, so I thought it would be worth talking about what’s going on there. Among the former socialist states that were not part of the Soviet Union, Poland is the largest, has the longest history as an independent state, and has the longest history of mass opposition to

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December 9, 2019 No Comments

Honing the University Party’s Growth Agenda

It’s election season, and so everyone is trotting out promises and coming up with manifestos. These manifestos are lists of specific promised policy initiatives, but they are also – implicitly – a description of how a political party sees the world – how it conceives of a better society and what steps it thinks are needed to get there.   Universities are not political parties, of course, but if we look at what they and their representative bodies in Ottawa (Universities

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September 16, 2019 1 Comment

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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