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Category: Colleges and Polytechnics

Every University and College Needs a Fool

OK, yes, lots of ways to complete that sentence (e.g. “Every university and college needs a fool… and mine already has several”, etc.).  But I mean this in a very literal sense.  Institutions need the equivalent of Medieval Fools, or Court Jesters, to help them combat bad institutional culture. In addition to being a barrel of laughs, Fools had a specific function in medieval and early renaissance courts; namely, they were able to speak truth to power, albeit obliquely (think Robin

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December 3, 2015 1 Comment

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Universities and Colleges

One of the problems in higher education is that there’s a whole lot of effort expended on “who’s the best” (which, as measured by most rankings, is some function of money, age, and size), and not a lot of serious effort put into answering the question: “how can institutions get better”?  (Or at least, in finding answers that don’t boil down to: publish more/get more international students.) I get to see a fair number of universities around the world.  And

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December 2, 2015 No Comments

Yukon College’s Difficult Path to University Status

Last week, Yukon Education Minister Doug Graham announced that the territory was going to change the name of Yukon College to Yukon University.  The College then proceeded to state that it would launch new degree programs and seek membership in Universities Canada in 2017. Well, now.  How is that going to work exactly? Universities Canada has some pretty clear guidelines about membership.  Point 4 says that a prospective member must have “… as its core teaching mission the provision of

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November 9, 2015 1 Comment

Five Questions for Ken Coates

So, Ken Coates of the University of Saskatchewan published a paper the week before last arguing that there were too many university students and not enough trades students, so we should reduce university enrolments by a third and what the hell is wrong with kids today anyway?  Despite being not much more than a warmed-over version of the paper he co-authored with Rick Miner in IRPP a couple of years ago, it got some attention because it played directly into both

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April 13, 2015 6 Comments

College Tuition 2014-15

Statistics Canada, for reasons best known to itself, only tracks tuition for university programs.  For college programs, we’re basically in the dark.  We’ve got nothing, nada, zip. In theory, it’s not all that difficult to work out.  All you need to know is price and enrolment for each program offered: sum the prices, divide by enrolment, and voila!  Average tuition.  And yet nobody does it (my guess for why Statscan doesn’t do it?  Something less than full confidence in the enrolment data

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April 6, 2015 8 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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