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Category: Institutions

Owning the Podium

I’m sure many of you saw Western President, Amit Chakma’s, op-ed in the National Post last week, suggesting that Canadian universities need more government assistance to reach new heights of excellence, and “own the podium” in global academia.  I’ve been told that Chakma’s op-ed presages a new push by the U-15 for a dedicated set of “excellence funds” which, presumably, would end up mostly in the U-15’s own hands (for what is excellence if not research done by the U-15?).  All I can

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November 5, 2013 2 Comments

Concentration vs. Distribution

I’m spending part of this week in Shanghai at the bi-annual World-Class Universities conference, which is put on by the good folks who run the Shanghai Jiao Tong Rankings. I’ll be telling you more about this conference later, but today I wanted to pick up on a story from the last set of Shanghai rankings in August.  You’d be forgiven for missing it – Shanghai doesn’t make the news the way the Times Higher Education rankings does, because its methodology doesn’t allow

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November 4, 2013 4 Comments

Better Know a Higher Ed System: the East African Community

Yeah, I know: Africa’s not a country. But in higher education, at least, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda are similar enough that they can be described as a single unit. The story starts with Makerere University in Kampala, which was founded in 1922.  It’s the mothership for the whole region – both the University of Dar Es Salaam and the University of Nairobi (the Tanzanian and Kenyan flagships) started as its branch campuses back in the 1960s, when it was known

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November 1, 2013 No Comments

How Domestic Students Experience Internationalization on Campus

So today, my colleague Jaqueline Lambert and I released a paper on how Canadian students view the process of internationalization (you can download the paper here).  It’s a mixed bag, frankly. On the one hand, we find pretty clearly that students buy into the principles of internationalization.  They are very positive about the goals internationalization is meant to foster (diversity, more global awareness), and they’re even enthused about how an increased presence of foreign students improves their schools’ prestige.  Over forty percent

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October 24, 2013 2 Comments

Faculty Salary Data You Should Probably Ignore

Recently, the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (OCUFA) published a comparison of American and Canadian academics’ salaries.  Using Canada’s National Household Survey (NHS) and the US Occupational Employment Statistics (OES) survey (which they described as being not quite apples-to-apples, but at least Macintosh-to-Granny Smith), they noted that average salaries for the combined college-and-university instructor population (the OES cannot disaggregate below that level) were $76,000.  In Canada, the figure was $65,000.  Hence, according to them, with the dollar at par, there is

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October 22, 2013 7 Comments

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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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