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Category: Institutions

The New Western Identity

There was a flurry of excitement last week about the University of Western Ontario’s new visual identity, and deservedly so: it is by some distance the most visually radical re-brand for a Canadian university in many years. Start with the good: getting rid of the tower was welcome and long overdue. The new graphics are a nice mix of old and new, retaining the palette, but significantly modernizing the overall look. They didn’t manage to unify the institutional and athletics

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February 2, 2012 1 Comment

UBC Gets It

Credit where credit is due: some absolutely brilliant stuff has been coming out of UBC in the last little while. Everybody in the country should pay attention. Exhibit A: The university’s decision to use broad-based admissions (BBA) – that is to say, an application process which takes into account not just grades, but also extra-curricular activities and the contents of personal essays – for its entire student intake. This is an enormously positive step. Just as the university experience is

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February 1, 2012 No Comments

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
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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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