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Category: Institutions

More Thoughts on Presidential Selections

A couple of points which I couldn’t quite jam into last week’s blog on University Presidents: 1) Where are the foreigners?   Why do we assume that only Canadians can run Canadian universities?  It’s fairly obvious from their actions that university Boards of Governors assume this.  And when we do want a “foreign” perspective, all we seem to do is repatriate Canadians (e.g.: Robert Birgenau at Toronto, Roseann Runte at Carleton, Doyle Anderson at FNU, etc.). That’s a pretty poor showing

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December 20, 2012 2 Comments

Lessons from Quebec

What lessons can we learn from the current mess in Quebec?  I think two stand out – one for students, and one for universities. The lesson for students is this: it’s great that they can mobilize and maintain pressure on government in the ways they have over the past twelve months.  But, if you fight a tuition fee hike by telling government that there’s oodles of waste and inefficiency in universities, don’t be surprised if they take you at your

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December 19, 2012 No Comments

Baumol vs. Bowen

A fascinating paper came out recently on SSRN, which should be of interest to anyone concerned with the economics of higher education.  Its purpose was to answer a most interesting question: is cost-inflation in higher education driven by internal factors, or external ones? There are two leading theories about cost-inflation in higher education.  The first, proposed by William Baumol (whose new book I mentioned last week), argues that external factors are to blame.  Education, as a labour-intensive good, says Baumol, will always see

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December 18, 2012 No Comments

The Beagles Have Landed

How do you run a business when profit is meaningless? This is a key question confronting every university administration. Our PSE institutes are businesses – complex organizations which require enormous amounts of money, from diverse sources, in order to succeed. For many reasons, it is a blessing that they are not oriented towards profit. But without a clear bottom line, how do you actually know when to spend, and when not to spend? What replaces the discipline of the market,

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December 17, 2012 1 Comment

Christmas Books

Holiday time means that you’re probably looking for gifts.  If you’re in the market for books related to higher education, I’ve got two recommendations for you. The first is, The University: An Illustrated History.   It’s a coffee-table book, too unwieldy even for reading in bed, let alone on an airplane.  But who cares?  It’s as good a single-volume history of higher learning as has ever been written; it’s admirably global in scope, and it does a very nice job of balancing the institution’s

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December 14, 2012 No 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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