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Category: Institutions

How High Can Pay Go?

A few months ago, in the midst of a very exciting battle of words at Windsor, I got into an internet discussion with a professor who was absolutely outraged by one of the administration’s proposals: namely, to put a ceiling on professors’ salary, including his, after 30 years of service. To step back for a moment: collective bargaining agreements generally outline a grid: a series of salary scales (or ladders, or steps – pick your term), generally one for each

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May 27, 2015 5 Comments

Game-Changing Institutional Alliances

A couple of weeks ago, Arizona State University and EdX announced an institutional tie-up, which received a fair bit of publicity.  Basically, the deal was that EdX – a well-known MOOC platform, owned jointly by Harvard and MIT – would help ASU put an undisclosed (but judging by the rollout, somewhere between 15 and 20) number of its big first-year courses online.  There were two startling things about this announcement: 1)      The MOOCs are not time-delimited, requiring students to start and

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May 26, 2015 1 Comment

Who Wins and Who Loses in the “Top 100 Under 50” Rankings

The annual Times Higher Education “Top 100 Under 50” universities came out a few weeks ago.  Australians were crowing about their success, and a few people in Canada noticed that Canada didn’t do so well – only four spots: Calgary 22nd, Simon Fraser 27th, UQAM 85th, and Concordia 96th.   So, today, we ask the question: why do young Canadian universities not fare well on these rankings? Well, one way to look at this is to ask: “who does well at these rankings?”

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May 20, 2015 1 Comment

The Economic Growth Imperative

A quick note: the OTTSYD will be on brief hiatus next week, as I’ll be in Japan and won’t have regular access to my computer.  Not to worry, though, we’ll pick back up on the 18th. Anyways: I was asked recently what I thought was the most important challenge for post-secondary education in Canada at the moment.  Resisting (barely) the flip answer “money”, I eventually settled on the allied concept of “learning how to promote economic growth and prosperity”. Now,

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May 8, 2015 3 Comments

The Evolution of Institutional Government Relations

I was speaking yesterday at the Government Relations Officers Conference in Banff, and it got me thinking about how the field has changed over the last 20 years. I started in government relations back in 1996, working for the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC) – now “Universities Canada”.  Back then, most medium-to-large institutions had government relations officers, but not government relations offices.  There would be one person, maybe with an assistant.  Their role was essentially to act as

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May 5, 2015 1 Comment
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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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