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Category: Institutions

Bibliometrics: Who’s the Best?

Today, we released the full version of our bibliometric paper, showing H-index averages on a discipline-by-discipline basis. You can find it here. (Keep in mind while reading it that the H-index isn’t a wholly straightforward statistic to interpret. If one discipline has an H-index of 10 and another has an H-index of five, you can’t simply say that professors in one discipline publish twice as much as the other. An H-index is just the largest number of publications for which

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June 13, 2012 1 Comment

Architecture and the Role of the University

Robert Hutchins, a former president of the University of Chicago, once described the university as “a collection of departments tied together by a common steam plant.” There’s some truth to this. Most academics will profess more loyalty to a discipline than an institution. Disciplines fight amongst each other for resources and the departmental structure they occupy has enormous possibilities for empire building. The only thing that really unites them is the heating plant (and perhaps the Finance and HR people

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May 31, 2012 1 Comment

Universities and Employment: Whose Job is it, Anyway?

Not surprisingly, a few of our readers have been pushing back on the series this week. Mainly, they’re skeptical that universities, in fact, have any responsibility where is employment is concerned. One line of argument is that students, themselves, are not in fact that concerned with employment. Exhibit #1 for this view is usually the well-known factoid that although 80% of students say they are at university to improve their employment prospects, a similar percentage say they are there because

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May 29, 2012 2 Comments

Unbundling

Over the past few years, we’ve heard recurrent calls and/or predictions that higher education will soon be “unbundled”.  What does this term mean, exactly? It’s a metaphor that’s been used in more than one way.  The unbundling allusion is mostly to the music industry which has seen technology allow consumers to unbundle its main product (albums) into smaller discrete chunks (songs), but there are also allusions here to the cable TV industry and to journalism.  Universities, it is argued, provide

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May 25, 2012 No Comments

Measuring Graduate Quality

A few months ago, I was in a discussion with a number of colleagues about how one should go about measuring how well universities and colleges prepare students for the labour market. It’s a tough question to answer. Employment rates aren’t helpful because those move with the economic cycle (and in places like Alberta with tight labour markets, low unemployment might be more of a sign of desperation for warm bodies than it is of educational quality). Employer satisfaction surveys

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May 24, 2012 No Comments

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