Category: Institutions

HESA’s AI Observatory: What’s new in higher education (November 16, 2024)

Spotlight Good morning all,  You might remember the $2.4B announcement made by the federal government last April for the implementation of a series of measures meant to Strengthen Canada’s AI Advantage. (If you don’t, or if you’d like a refresher, you can read about it in our Budget 2024 Commentary). Within those $2.4B, $50M were earmarked for the creation of a Safety Institute. While this announcement was generally well received by our Canadian AI godfathers, little information was available at that

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Two Advances in Research Rankings

Hi all. Just a quick one today, bringing you up to date with a couple of new and interesting developments in the field of research rankings. The first has to do with the sudden rise of “Open” bibliometric data. To date, all of the major research rankings have used data from one of the two major publishers: Elsevier or Clarivate (formerly known as Thompson Reuters). No surprise here: Elsevier’s Scopus and Clarivate’s Web of Science are the main collators of

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Global Rankings Update 2024

Global Rankings Update 2024 Morning all. There are so many international rankings to track from one year to another that it’s easy to go a little glassy-eyed. So now that the 2025 Times Higher World Rankings are out, I thought I would do a little round up. Let’s start with how Canadian institutions did on the “Big Three” research rankings: The Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), the Times Higher Education World University Rankings (THE), and the QS World

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The Road Ahead for International Students

You could be forgiven if, after the last few months, you thought that Canadian post-secondary institutions should be turning their attention away from international students. But nothing could be further from the truth. The underlying dynamics of international student recruitment have not changed—institutions still need money and provincial governments are basically united in their determination to prevent them from getting it from domestic sources—only the tactics going forward have. Let’s start on the college side. Their business has mostly been

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Enshittification as a Strategy

Many of you seem amused by my use of the term “enshittification” (“word of the year” for 2023 by the American Dialect Society) to describe much of what is going on in Canadian higher education a the moment. I suspect just as many of you dislike my use of the term (hi, Mom!), but I’m going to keep using it anyway because it so concisely expresses today’s state of affairs. Technically, I am using the term incorrectly. When Cory Doctorow first

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