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Category: Institutions

Size Matters

Did this make it through your spam filters? Here’s hoping. Ok, so everyone knows from even a casual glance at student satisfaction data that there’s a correlation between institutional size and satisfaction. Students, on average, prefer small schools to big schools. Makes them feel more at home. Less of a leap from high school. The accompanying small class sizes don’t hurt either (the relationship between size and satisfaction is of course one reason why the Globe and Mail’s Canadian University

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May 18, 2012 2 Comments

A Duty Ignored

One of the reasons universities have had such success in attracting students over the years is the promise they hold for better employment. Over 80% of students say that “getting a better job” is a main reason for going to university. It’s not the only reason they go, of course; most have some kind of intellectual interest in the subjects they study. But the promise of good job outcomes is pretty central to the appeal of a university. So why

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May 1, 2012 14 Comments

On Being on Strike

What does it mean to be a student on strike? Recently, Concordia University announced that its board had settled on Ryerson provost Alan Shepard as its choice for president. Shepard, who’s had a very successful tenure at Ryerson, was unanimously recommended by a search committee that included student leaders. The prospective new president had hoped to engage in a public discussion with the university community prior to the formal selection taking place; unfortunately, the event was derailed by a handful

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April 30, 2012 No Comments

New Economies, New University

Yesterday, we looked at how the economy was being increasingly divided into a successful, productive globally-traded goods sector, and a more sheltered mostly public-service focused sector. I also noted how certain parts of the university such as engineering, computer science, biomedicine, and finance/management have tended to adopt the views of people involved in the first group of industries, while arts, education, social work, etc., align with the second. This matters because, increasingly, governments are getting concerned about productivity. Due to

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April 27, 2012 No Comments

Two Economies, Two Universities

There’s an interesting debate going on in American policy circles based on arguments Tyler Cowen advanced in his recent book The Great Stagnation, one with enormous relevance for thinking about the future of the university. The argument is that there are two economies in America today. The first (call it “Economy I”) is composed of the sectors dealing in globally traded goods, which are required to be extremely inventive and dynamic because of the pressure of foreign competition. It is

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April 26, 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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