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Category: Institutions

A Simple Solution for Statistics on Doctoral Education

Higher Education statistics in Canada are notoriously bad.  But if you think general stats on higher ed are hard to come by, try looking at our statistical systems with respect to doctoral education and its outcomes. Time-to-completion statistics are a joke.  Almost no one releases this data; when it is released, it often appears to be subject to significant “interpretation” (there’s a big difference between time-to-completion and “registered” time-to-completion.  If you want to keep the latter down, just tell students

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October 16, 2013 2 Comments

Where Responsibility for Financial Sustainability Lies

I often write about the unsustainability of university finances, the lunacy of its cost base, the fact that Canadian profs are better paid than in any public system of higher education in the world, etc.  Some people have concluded from this that I am hostile to labour, or to academic unions in particular. But that’s not true.  Though I do call BS on some of the sanctimonious nonsense that comes out of academic unions on the beleaguered state of their

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October 8, 2013 19 Comments

Superior Strategy

You may recall that, a few weeks ago, I was somewhat harsh about Western’s new strategic plan for being a kind of Stepford-link strategy: generic, and utterly lacking in anything that suggested Western had its own strengths and personality.  If you follow me on twitter, you may have seen me make some similar remarks about Waterloo’s strategic plan.  Waterloo is one of the country’s few universities that genuinely has a unique value proposition, and deep strengths on which to build –

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October 7, 2013 No Comments

Better Know a Higher Ed System – Poland

So, you’re a new, post-communist country.  You have an undereducated population; your universities are filled with discredited Marxists; you’re broke, and your constitution says you can’t charge tuition fees.  What do you do? Well, if it’s 1990, and you’re Poland, you do two things: 1)      Let the private sector rip.  Sure, private universities are low prestige, and they only do cheap subjects like business, law, and social sciences.  But since those were precisely the areas where the – traditionally high-prestige – public universities

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October 3, 2013 1 Comment

The View from Vilnius

I spent an enjoyable couple of days in Lithuania last week, at a meeting of the EU’s Directors General of Higher Education.  I was there to talk about some research we at HESA (along with some colleagues from DZHW in Germany) are doing for the European Commission, assessing the impact of cost-sharing on institutions and students.  Unsurprisingly, at the margins of the conference (and occasionally within its proceedings), what really drove conversation were tales of austerity, and their effects on

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September 30, 2013 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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