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Category: Institutions

Distinct Missions

Why are Canadian universities so scared of acting differently from one another?  Why does no one want a niche? I’m not just talking about their cookie-cutter mission statements here, which seem to involve adding the words “research” and “excellence” to the output of a random word generator. I’m talking about the cookie-cutter ways they go about their daily business. In marketing-speak: they have little or no brand personality. It’s not as though cool niche missions are that hard to dream

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January 25, 2012 No Comments

A Very Odd Employment “Study”

Many of you will have seen a Toronto Star story last week about a new report from the Ontario government indicating that in the wake of the recession, the provincial economy was creating more new jobs for college grads and apprentices than for university graduates.  Cue blather about how technology and the recession are radically changing the labour market, etc. Did anyone else find it odd that the Star never named the study?  I still haven’t been able to locate an actual

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January 23, 2012 2 Comments

Applicant Surveys We’d Like to See

I’ve always been a bit intrigued by the continuing popularity of Applicant Surveys. What is it that people expect to see in this year’s results that weren’t there last year? There are basically three sets of research questions that are at the heart of current applicant surveys: who is applying (i.e., the social/ethnic composition), what information tools are students using to acquire information about institutions, and what do students say they are looking for in an institution? The “who applies”

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January 17, 2012 1 Comment

Can Universities Compete?

There’s a basic problem with trying to get universities to compete with one another: most of them are structurally incapable of following any coherent competitive strategy at all. Michael Porter posited that there were basically three generic types of competitive strategies.  Those competing on a broad scale could compete on cost (e.g., WalMart), or they could compete on product differentiation that allows them to charge a premium (e.g., Apple, Mercedes-Benz).  A third option is to limit oneself to a particular

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December 14, 2011 5 Comments

A University of the North?

Every so often, the idea of a “University of the North/Arctic” pops up. Last month, it was the new Yukon Premier making the case for one. A lot of the rhetoric around the idea of a northern university has been along the lines of “other northern countries have them and it’s embarrassing that we don’t” (the Walter Gordon Foundation has issued a cute map to make this point visually). Let’s ignore the facts that (i) the Walter Gordon map includes

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December 13, 2011 2 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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