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Category: Institutions

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

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
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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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